Back Door Into History

In the same week that Missouri native Sheryl Crow was suggesting that American consumers reduce their toilet paper consumption to one square per bowel movement, a little pinch of Kansas City’s rectal history was listed for sale on eBay. A seller used the online auction site to sell a “vintage physician’s sample tin” that once contained rectal cones (active ingredients: tannic acid, hydroxyquinoline, menthol and benzocaine) prepared by the staff of the long-forgotten Thornton & Minor Hospital. The empty, pocket-sized blue-and-white tin –- no vintage cones remained — sold for $9.75, a modest price for a relic of the days when Kansas City was literally flush with clinics for rectal and colonic diseases.