The topic of tobacco enemas has periodically provided
media outlets seeking a quirky history and science feature with colorful material. An oft-mentioned tale, for example, is the
1746 case of a man who, in an effort to save his drowned wife, inserted the stem end of his tobacco pipe into her rectum, covered the lit bowl with paper, and "blew hard" — allegedly reviving her.
Many of these stories or anecdotes
invoke the phrase "blow smoke up your ass" — commonly interpreted to mean acts of deception such as telling someone what they want to hear, or insincerely flattering them — to draw a connection between the tobacco enema practice and the phrase. Others have invoked the phrase to
point out that humans indeed once considered blowing smoke into a human's ass to have been a perfectly reasonable practice: