Oddball Book on Drinking Your Own Pee

Original photo taken by “counterclockwise”.
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page.

“Auto-urine therapy” is just a nicer way of saying “drinking your own pee”, which some people believe has healthful effects. There are a number of famous people who tried auto-urine therapy for health reasons: Gandhi did it, as did Idi Amin, Steve McQueen, Keith Richards and Jim Morrison. You know what they have in common? They’re all dead!

(Some of you might say “Wait a minute — Keith Richards isn’t dead! I suggest that you take a look at the photo of Mr. Richards below:

Whatever that is, that ain’t what I’d call “alive”.)

The front cover of the book Auto-Urine Therapy (shown at the top of this article), while amusing, is nowhere near as entertaining as the back cover:

Original photo taken by “counterclockwise”.
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page.

The text on the back cover is filled with unintentional hilarity, such as refering to urine as “salubrious water”, but the best line of all is:

If we can drink the urine of cows, why can’t we drink our own urine?

I said the same thing at age 8 to freak out any gullible classmate who was drinking milk in the lunchroom. Clearly the book’s author (or perhaps the publisher) is missing the whole idea of what it means to be a mammal.

Recommended Reading

The Urine Cure and Other Curious Medical Treatments is a brief history of urine as a curative. It includes excerpts from the pamphlet Urine-Therapy: It May Save Your Life.