Now you might be skeptical, but Dr Young’s butt plugs seem to have been a big hit. Not only were they sold for over 40 years, but ads are full of glowing testimonials from clients like Reverend Hezekiah Cook. At first, the Reverend Cook “could hardly stand to insert the small one,” but by a simple process of “inserting and withdrawing” each dilator several times, he was soon able to work his way up to the largest. Then there was a certain Mr. Loughborough, who wrote that inserting a dilator for an hour each day left him “healthy as a government buck…ten thousand dollars would not tempt me to sell my set.” In fact, Dr. Young was so confident in his product that he offered a 100 percent money back guarantee on any returned dilators, which we’re just not going to think about too much.
Dr. Young’s miracle plugs were sold from the 1890s all the way up to 1940, when he was shut down by the close-minded prudes at the FDA, who insisted that the product was mislabelled and would “not be efficacious” in treating “coated tongue, foul breath, bad taste in the mouth, sallow skin, acne, lassitude, mental hebetude, headache, spurious diarrhea, colicky pains, hemorrhoids, occasional prolapse, nervous irritability and cold extremities” as the packaging promised. They also felt that the plugs “would be dangerous to health if used with the frequency and duration prescribed.” Dr. Young failed to make a defense and the product was duly banned, finally ending that glorious era when your doctor could just listen to your litany of awful diseases and just go, “Wow that sucks, have you tried doing butt stuff about it?”
Related: 5 Nightmarish Ways People In History Solved Common Problems
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