I remember being into scat, diseases, and epidemics when I was 4 or 5, but it might have been earlier because I don't remember very much of anything before that age. Then again, I wouldn't have been able to read well enough to understand concepts like epidemics till I was at least 4 1/2. (I was an early reader. I also thought that "epidemic" was "empidic" until I was about 10.) I didn't generally experience sexual arousal until puberty, just mental satisfaction. I would read about diseases and make up fictional ones, and then pretend my toys and action figures were getting sick with them. It was close enough to "playing doctor" that I didn't realize that other children didn't do that. By the time I was 7, I was imagining characters from books I read getting sick, especially characters from historical books, and even making up original characters. One of them, called "Infectiman" (pretty good naming for a kid!) was a bacteria-sized human who lived in the intestines of a "giant" and regularly schemed with various germs and parasites to make the giant sick. It was more about the diseases and the inside view of infected bodies and organs than micro/macro. Infectiman and his pathogen friends would hide in the appendix when they made the giant have diarrhea so they wouldn't get swept out of his body. Sometimes Infectiman also got himself sick for the fun of it. I had some association of purging from all orifices as some kind of release, even though I didn't know anything about sex yet. Another character, whose name I can't remember, lived in a fictional poison garden with a hollow tree, and inside the hollow tree was a pool of sap that gave you diarrhea when you drank it, sort of like poison ivy for your intestines. When I was 11, I read Dante's *Inferno*, which has scenes where sinners are punished with diseases or being made to stand in pits of sewage or squished bugs, and Camus' *The Plague.* They were just on bookshelves at our house and I was bored; it wasn't for school and I didn't know they were "Great Literature." Books were books. I liked the *Inferno* and read it obsessively, especially the 8th circle. Camus had a neat scenario, but bubonic plague is one of the less appealing diseases to me, the translation was a bit harder to read, I was way too young to get the philosophy Camus has going on as the subtext, way too many people died (I don't like death in my porn, usually), and I found the setting confusing bc I thought only Medieval people got plague.
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