Fart Proudly

"Fart Proudly" (also called "A Letter to a Royal Academy", and "To the Royal Academy of Farting") is the popular name of a "notorious essay" about flatulence written by Benjamin Franklin c. 1781 while he was living abroad as United States Ambassador to France.

"A Letter to a Royal Academy" was composed in response to a call for scientific papers from the Royal Academy of Brussels. Franklin believed that the various academic societies in Europe were increasingly pretentious and concerned with the impractical. Revealing his "bawdy, scurrilous side," Franklin responded with an essay suggesting that research and practical reasoning be undertaken into methods of improving the odor of human flatulence.

The essay was never submitted but was sent as a letter to Richard Price, a Welsh philosopher and Unitarian minister in England with whom Franklin had an ongoing correspondence. The text of the essay's introduction reads in part:

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year...Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age. It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

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