"Maomao took an antitoxin to help cool her head. She would have been perfectly safe without it, but she felt like being sure, and anyway, she was intrigued to see how someone else had gone about making the drug. In this case, it caused her to vomit powerfully enough to bring up the entire contents of her stomach, a delightful emetic."
— The Apothecary Diaries Volume 1
Something has infected a person's body, and it needs to be rid of. There's no use surgically removing the toxic agent or drinking a potion to heal the person. There's only one option left: excrete it.
Yep, you read right.
The ailing person could purge whatever is causing them distress, be it magic, a toxin, or something that should not be in the body to begin with. This can be achieved through crying, puking, sweating, or peeing. Bleeding the illness out is another option, but it's been discredited by scientists. Applied Phlebotinum can be one such toxic agent that needs to be excreted. The Power of Love can expedite the process. However, it should be mentioned that this trope tends to lead to unrealistically swift recoveries.
Do Not Try This at Home! Vomiting does not reliably remove poison from the stomach. It's particularly unhelpful if done in the eleventh hour (when the poison has been absorbed already), or the poison was injected, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin and therefore wouldn't reach the stomach in the first place. Similarly, real-life poisons can't be easily excreted by crying, sweating, peeing, or bleeding it out. In fact, all these solutions can risk the patient becoming dehydrated, exacerbating an already life-threatening situation. Long story short, if you think you've been poisoned, call the emergency line and let the experts worry about your treatment.
Compare Swiss-Army Tears, when the tears themselves heal the person. Also compare Suck Out the Poison. Can cross over with Revolting Rescue if a person forces another to vomit. See also Cathartic Crying, which is about releasing emotions that someone has had to bottle up. Contrast Gassy Scare, when the source of pain is just gas that has to be let out and there's no real danger. Also contrast Magic Antidote for a less squicky way to treat a poisoned character. See also Getting Sick Deliberately, which may involve puking something out intentionally. If one person believes they may have accidentally eaten poison or ingested some expired food or liquid and get sick and then everyone else around witnessing the first person believes they might have ingested the same thing and follow suit with sympathetic vomiting, see Vomit Chain Reaction.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood: During the final battle between Jonathan and Dio, Dio manages to get ahold of Jonathan's carotid artery by digging his fingers into Jonathan's neck, with the intent of severing it to drink his blood and also turn him into a zombie, as his vampire essence is part of that attack. After Jonathan is able to get free, he's able to eject the vampire essence from the entry wound Dio made, presumably as part of his Hamon abilities.
- Saint Seiya: In the first anime, during the "Dark Saints" arc, Pegasus Seiya fights against his Evil Counterpart, Black Pegasus, but he is hit by many of the Black Pegasus's dark meteor-like punches. After a while, Seiya's body begins to darken until his whole body is "infected", so to speak. His friend and ally, Draco/Dragon Shiryu, decides to puncture Seiya's body in specific areas so Black Pegasus's poison bleeds out of the latter's body.
- Slime Saint: When the titular slime attempts to assimilate Jelly Aspic's freshly dead body at the beginning of the story, the slime realizes Jelly was poisoned. While slimes are immune to poisons, it still tries to remove the poison from Jelly's body as it continues assimilating, causing Jelly to regurgitate.
Fan Works
- Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami: When Dark gets his arms injected with deadly poison, he simply "gargles all the poison out" and spits it onto the ground like it's mouthwash. He's just that awesome.
- In The Loud House fanfic Gear Up
, Lana is suffering from what's ostensibly food poisoning, but Lisa cures her by making a medicine and feeding it to Lana, who then throws up and returns to normal.
- The Rigel Black Chronicles: Harry makes use of a modified toxin expulsion draught in her revenge on the Weasley Twins for their Valentine's Day prank. The draught is designed to bind to toxins and force them out of every orifice: mouth, ears, nose, even pores. Harry uses a mail bomb to cover the Twins in glitter and a powder that will change from being colorless to a pink goo when it becomes wet, then tricks them into eating sweets coated in the draught. Moments later, they're oozing floods of pink goo from every pore.
- In A Thing of Vikings, after a visiting Eirish princess is poisoned, Astrid is able to get her to the healer's hut, where she is promptly given a purgative.
Films — Animation
- Asterix and Cleopatra: When the Gauls have to prove to Cleopatra that her present cake (which was actually delivered by Artifis in an attempt to sabotage the construction of the Royal Palace) wasn't poisonous at all, Panoramix provides the group a potion that would purge their bodies from every kind of toxin. The effects of the antidote are shown by Obelix, who expels the toxins (shown as a greenish fume) from his ears (and that after eating the whole cake, minus two slices).
- Justice League: Doom: Invoked. Ma'alefa'ak gives J'onn a soda laced with a toxin, but reveals the poison won't kill him as his body will automatically sweat it out. However, this causes J'onn to be thoroughly coated in a highly flammable magnesium solution which Ma'alefa'ak promptly lights on fire.
- Spirited Away: As a reward for purifying a polluted river spirit, Chihiro is given a purgative ball that makes people vomit when consumed. She gives one half to Haku and the other half to a spirit known as No-Face. In Haku's case, he had swallowed a magic seal he was ordered to steal. However, the curse protecting it (in the form of a black slug) is meant to kill whoever steals the seal, and so Haku is bleeding internally by the time he returns from his mission. Thankfully, Chihiro's medicine and her squishing the regurgitated slug saved his life. As for No-Face, he had swallowed some of the staff at the baths as well as eaten huge amounts of food. These actions have caused him to balloon in size and become corrupted. When Chihiro gives him the other half of the medicine, he subsequently vomits all that he consumed, thereby reverting him back to his original harmless self.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: As SpongeBob SquarePants gets ready for the grand opening of The Krusty Krab 2, he eats a bar of soap as part of his bath routine, hooks up a water hose to one of his pores, and then blasts soap foam out through the many holes in his body. Soap contains lye, a caustic alkali known to cause gastrointestinal distress.
Films — Live-Action
- Casino Royale (2006): Upon noticing his drink had just been spiked with a lethal poison, Bond immediately heads for the bathroom to start hurling into the sink. He's only partially successful, as enough poison is still in his body to stop his heart and nearly kill him.
- The King's Man: Rasputin pauses his hypnosis session with Orlando to vomit up the poisoned Bakewell tart he'd eaten, though he claims to have built up an immunity to the poison later.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze: After the Turtles feed Tokka and Razar donuts laced with anti-mutagen, the two villainous mutants begin burping uncontrollably. As the Turtle's scientist friend explains, since CO2 is a crucial part of the anit-mutagen process, all their burping is essentially this trope. The Turtles get around this by blasting CO2 fire extinguishers into their mouths.
- Truth or Dare (2017): When one of the participants is dared to drink a toxic green substance, they all chug soda and share the poison with the intention of puking it up before it can harm them.
Literature
- Andy Griffiths' Just Series: In one story, Andy's dog Sooty accidentally eats some of Andy's chocolate. He and Danny try to make him throw up, including commanding him to do it and making him smoke.
- Anne of Green Gables: Anne saves Diana's younger sister, Minnie May, from croup note by force-feeding her ipecac in the hopes vomiting will bring up the membrane that is covering her airway and suffocating her. It works, and even the doctor admits Anne saved Minnie May's life. Anne knew how to do this because she spent much of her own childhood raising other people's children in Adopt-a-Servant situations.
- Artemis Fowl: Artemis tricks an alcoholic fairy into drinking holy water, then gives her a shot of water from a fairy well to counter the holy water in exchange for taking pictures of the fairies' sacred book. As a partial apology, he then gives her an artificial virus that will purge her of alcohol and undo some of the damage to her liver. The fairy agrees, and goes into spasms after Artemis gives her the shot.
'Time to leave,' commented Artemis. 'A hundred years of alcohol leaving a body by any means possible is not a pretty sight.'
- The Apothecary Diaries: Maomao's experimentation with poisons and medicines makes this a minor Running Gag: she keeps emetics handy for her job as a poison taster in the early volumes (despite having some degree of Acquired Poison Immunity), and frequently induces vomiting to treat poisonings of other people.
- Volume 1:
- Maomao treats Consort Lihua for lead poisoning in part by having her spend time in a sauna to sweat out the lead that's built up in her tissues.
- While tasting Consort Gyokuyou's meal at the winter garden party, Maomao realizes that the soup was poisoned from the flavor. Despite the fact she didn't swallow, she downs an emetic in the medical office, partly just to be on the safe side, and partly out of curiosity at the skills of the main court's doctors. (This scene is modified in the anime, where Maomao used an emetic she brought with her to the party.)
- Grams, the Miss Kitty of the brothel Maomao grew up next door to, has a habit of kicking Maomao in the gut to make her vomit up whatever poisons she'd consumed recently.
- Maomao responds to the poisoning of a brothel worker and her john by inducing them both to vomit to get rid of any poison still in the stomach, then starts grinding some charcoal as an ingredient in an antidote before her foster father Luomen arrives and takes over.
- Volume 2: While explaining how a Body of the Week may have been poisoned by improperly-processed imported seaweed, Maomao presents Jinshi, Gaoshun and Basen with two samples made from the seaweed she stole while inspecting the victim's kitchen: one in which the ingredient was left untouched, one in which it was treated with a lye solution overnight, as this type of seaweed is conventionally treated with lye before being sold. She tries out a sample of the treated seaweed, but her rather ambiguous response on whether it's actually safe to eat ("I'll be fine... I think") makes Jinshi force-feed her the emetic she brought as a precaution; cue Vomit Discretion Shot. Later in that scene, all three men engage in a conversation with a fourth person who shows up, so Maomao took the chance to try a bit of the untreated sample. The guys immediately induce her to vomit, knowing Maomao's propensity to take poison herself to test its effects.
- Volume 1:
- The Daevabad Trilogy: Late in The Empire of Gold, Nahri uses healing magic to cure the djinn Dara e-Afshin of a Cold Iron injection by expelling it through a cut. Justified since the metal couldn't be metabolized or neutralized, only removed, and her patient has the Super-Toughness to survive the extraction.
- The Fifth Season: Alabaster combines his orogeny with Syenite's and the Obelisk attuned to her to extract a paralytic toxin from his body, which he vomits up as a bit of goop. Not only is it normally impossible to use orogeny at the molecular level, he does it in seconds while choking to death.
"Any infant can move a mountain; that's instinct. Only a trained Fulcrum orogene can deliberately, specifically, move a boulder. And only a ten-ringer, apparently, can move the infinitesimal substances floating and darting in the interstices of his blood and nerves."
- Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey: Serge Storms inverts homophobic radio show host Moe "Holy Moly" Grenadine upside down and pours an entire bottle of rum into his rectum, then plugs his anus with a bar of novelty soap. Serge informs Moe that he's just administered enough alcohol to fatally poison him, except it will hit his system much quicker (and much more painfully) than it would if Moe had swallowed the liquor, unless he receives a massive enema in the next fifteen minutes. Moe stumbles downstairs and yells at people to give him an enema. Even in Key West, this gets him labeled a pervert and thrown out of every hotel and club he tries it in.
- Fudge: In Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Fudge swallows Dribble the turtle whole, so he's given magnesium and laxatives to try to puke or defecate him out. Later, he manages to expel Dribble, but whether or not he vomited or defecated him out is left unsaid.
- Ghost Roads: When Rose is bound by Runic Magic in the form of salt cooked into pancakes, she has to drink lots of water until she can pee out all the salt.
- Green Angel: The titular character Green experiences a tragedy that kills her family. It is during this tragedy that embers fly into Green's eyes, thereby nearly blinding her. Since she refuses to cry in fear of admitting her family's not coming back, the embers remain in her eyes until she finally lets it all out near the end of the book.
- The Green Mile: Condemned convict John Coffey uses his Angel Unaware powers on guard Paul Edgecomb, by absorbing Paul's urinary tract infection, and expirating it like black chaff into the air, where it dissipates. Paul is thenceforth cured and can pee normally.
- In Isaac Asimov's "Paté De Foie Gras", a goose is suffering from a mutation which makes it produce a certain poisonous heavy metal in its body. The goose is forced to constantly excrete the poison...by laying golden eggs.
- In A Prison Diary, Jeffrey Archer learned that a well-known fact among prisoners is that heroin can be flushed out of the body via urine within a day by drinking large amounts of water, unlike cannabis, which can remain in the system for a month. Because of this, many prisoners take heroin rather than cannabis, because it can be prevented from showing in drug tests.
- Sad Cypress: The murderer shares a poisoned meal with the victim then injects herself with a strong emetic in order to rid herself of the poison before it can harm her.
- In the Father Brown short story The Salad of Colonel Cray, Brown gives an emetic to do this, using contents of the very cruet stand that a would-be poisoner took to prevent such an emetic being given.
- Sing Unburied Sing: Leonie has Kayla drink a concoction to soothe a stomachache she has. Worrying that it may make Kayla sicker, Jojo stuffs his fingers down her throat to force her to puke it all out.
- ''The Sirens Of Surrentum": The young detectives visit a famous poisoner, Locusta (supposedly the daughter of the woman of the same name employed by Emperor Nero), who offers them refreshment, then casually informs them that she's slipped each of them a deadly poison. The antidote for each one is different, and to one distraught girl, she says there is no antidote, but hands her a feather and tells her to run to the privy and stick the feather down her throat.
- The Snow Queen: The demon mirror that exaggerates negative qualities shatters one day, thus sending the shards in all directions. If a shard lodges itself in a person's eye, they will only see imperfection. However, if a shard lands in one's heart, the person will become cruel. Both scenarios happen to Kai before he is spirited away by the Snow Queen. When his childhood friend Gerda finds him again, her tears dislodge the shard from his heart. Kai cries out the other shard when Gerda sings him their song.
- In The Tommyknockers, when Bobbi wants to get rid of Gardener, she makes him swallow a lethal dose of Valium at gunpoint. After Gardener manages to shoot her with a hidden gun, he drinks salted water and vomits up the pills.
- Void Domain: Eva heals Shalise's Plague Zombie infection with a Blood Magic ritual that expels the infection through the original bite. It rips open a nasty exit wound in the process, but leaves her alive and able to receive normal healing magic.
- Warrior Cats: Medicine cats use yarrow to induce vomiting when a cat has eaten something poisonous. For instance, Cinderpelt uses it to save a kit's life after she's eaten deathberries in The Darkest Hour.
Live-Action TV
- Breaking Bad: In "Salud", Gus Fring offers a bottle of poisoned tequila to Don Eladio. Gus, the Don, and all of the Don's men drink a shot. Gus then excuses himself and goes to the bathroom to induce vomiting, while the Don and his men all die within a few seconds of each other. Enough of the poison remained in Gus's body that he still required medical treatment afterwards.
- Cadfael: In "Monk's Hood", the Victim of the Week comes down with poisoning symptoms after eating a dish that was shared with the Abbey's Prior. Cadfael attempts to treat him with an emetic—commenting that "it may do as much harm coming up as going down"—but the man dies. Cadfael tells Brother Oswin to rush to the Prior's table, now. Later the Prior nervously says he has no symptoms, but the assistant told him to "rid myself of all I'd eaten." Cadfael says that was probably unnecessary, but good advice nonetheless.
- Doctor Who:
- "Smith and Jones": The Doctor kills a monster by blasting it with X-rays from a souped-up medical machine. Having absorbed a dangerous amount of X-ray energy himself, he "excretes" it into his shoe by hopping and turning.
- "The Unicorn and the Wasp": The Doctor is poisoned with cyanide, and needs to "stimulate the inhibited enzymes into reversal, thus curing himself". This takes him ingesting ginger beer, a protein, and something salty, plus getting a big shock, after which he is able to exhale the cyanide in a cloud of smoke.
- Fear the Walking Dead: Zombie Apocalypse survivor Martha became a crazed Serial Killer after nobody came to her help when her husband was mortally wounded, killing helpful survivors she came across and poisoning all the water supplies she found with anti-freeze. Morgan Jones' group (bar Morgan himself) drink some of that water and get poisoned. Fortunately, they learn that ethanol can purge anti-freeze, and Morgan finds the beer truck of the late Jim Brauer Just in Time to save everyone (ethanol indeed helps to purge anti-freeze poisoning).
- House: A patient — actually a convicted murderer — tries to commit suicide by ingesting some kind of printer fluid. House convinces him to have one last alcoholic drink. When the patient is done, House explains how said drink will react chemically with the poison, causing him to harmlessly pee it out.
- Into the Dark: Cody, the heroine of "Pilgrim", dispatches several of the murderous, home-invading pilgrims by sneaking poisonous berries into their dinner. Main villains Ethan and Patience, however, manage to survive by inducing themselves to vomit.
- Nikita:
- "2.0": While helping Alex through heroin withdrawal in the Troubled Backstory Flashbacks, Nikita returns from a grocery run to find the girl has swallowed a bunch of pills in an attempted suicide. Nikita quickly dilutes some dish soap and forces it down Alex's throat to induce vomiting and revive her.
- "Pandora": Knowing from "Glass Houses" that Roan's procedure for Disposing of a Body involves injecting it with a chemical that will cause it to expel a number of other chemicals out its pores, Alex fakes Nikita's death with a gunshot to her Bulletproof Vest followed by an injection of tetrodotoxin. The injection causes Nikita to expel the tetrodotoxin and wake up, whereupon she quickly splashes Roan in the face with the Hollywood Acid he was going to use to dissolve her body and escapes.
- Parks and Recreation: In one episode, Ron drinks an entire bottle of scotch after taking some painkillers. Ann and Leslie force him to purge it, much to his dismay since he sees it as a waste of expensive scotch.
- The Prisoner (1967): In "The Girl Who Was Death", Number Six (or at least the character in the story he's telling, who may or may not actually have been him) is engaged in a game of cat and mouse with an assassin intent on killing him. Early on, while searching for his opponent in a pub, he drinks a beer, only to find "You have just been poisoned" engraved on the bottom of the glass. He proceeds to order and down a wide selection of spirits in rapid succession, causing him to throw up.
- Smallville: It's shown several times that, if Clark directly ingests Kryptonite, it can be purged from his body. This varies depending on the type of Kryptonite, though. His body will naturally purge ingested Green Kryptonite with a runny nose, but with Red Kryptonite, he has to be induced to sweat it out by using Green Kryptonite to literally make his blood boil. However, this is only when it is ingested, so if he is stabbed with a Kryptonite knife or shot with a Kryptonite bullet, it will remain lodged in his body unless physically removed by outside forces.
- Teen Wolf: After being shot with a wolfsbane-laced bullet, Derek begins throwing up thick black fluid. When Stiles freaks out, asking what the substance is, Derek explains that his body is desperately trying to purge the poisonous substance from his system.
Video Games
- The "Lonesome Road" DLC for Fallout: New Vegas has the poison/radiation cure recipe "Firey Purgative", which consists of a jalapeño pepper, a handful of horsenettle berries, and a bottle of vodka. Your character essentially drinks pepper spray to give them the runs in order to flush the poison out of their system.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: Snake can become sick or poisoned through various methods like eating rotten food or getting bitten by various creatures. While taking the proper medicine will cure the status ailment, the player can also spin Snake around on the survival viewer using the analog stick. Do this enough times, and Snake will be so dizzy that he purges his system by throwing up.
- Resident Evil 3 (Remake): The only way for Jill to cure herself if she's infected with Drain Deimos parasites is to consume a green herb, which forces her to puke out the parasites.
- West of Loathing: The cure for the Poison status is "Patent Emetic", which is stated to work by causing the character to puke up the bad stuff making them ill.
Web Animation
- Discussed in Zero Punctuation at the end of Yahtzee's review of Call of Duty: Ghosts:
"But somehow it's only getting worse! Black Ops II actually came across as at least slightly self-aware, and Modern Warfare 1 went so far as being profound, such as in that bit where you die slowly and horribly in a nuclear blast. If that happened in CoD: Ghosts, you'd probably just fart all the radiation out in one big heroic guff, pull the broken glass out of your eyeballs, and then use it to shiv the Ayatollah."
Webcomics
- The Shadow Shard: When Twilight Sparkle and Spike are called to deal with King Sombra's encased horn in the Crystal Empire, Twilight's attempted spell causes a shard of the horn to lodge itself in Spike's eye. Throughout the comic, the shard distorts his early memories so he remembers only the pain of Twilight rejecting him as her son. After Sombra is defeated again and Twilight and Spike mend their relationship, Spike cries out the shard, and it dissipates.
Web Original
- Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Sometimes, a character in one of the fanfictions the agents visit will end up eating something that ought to be poisonous to them. The agent will use a device called an "anachronistic biochemical substance eliminator" to try to make the food in the character's stomach simply disappear into nothingness. If that doesn't work, the agent will give the character ipecac syrup to make them vomit it up, and if that doesn't work, they will give them senna pods to make them poop it out.
Websites
- Darwin Awards: An urban legend has a family sit down to a dinner of wild mushrooms, when they notice the cat (who was given some) start meowing loudly. Fearing the mushrooms were poisonous, they rushed to the ER to have their stomachs pumped...and returned to find the cat had given birth. The story is disqualified for an award both because its veracity is doubtful and because the rush to the hospital was actually the smart move.
- Snopes: The site fact-checked a story wherein a woman chased her pet away from an open can of salmon she was going to use in mousse for a dinner party, only to later discover the pet dead, presumably of food poisoning. They rushed off to the hospital to get their stomachs pumped, only for the woman to learn later that the pet had just been hit by a car. The article shows this Urban Legend has been around since at least The '40s and probably never happened.
- SCP Foundation: SCP-1842-1 is a wooden toy microwave that can be used to transform a special kind of clay (SCP-1842-2) into edible food. Eating SCP-1842-2 in its raw form causes symptoms similar to lead poisoning, but if the person who ate it throws it up or excretes it, the poisoning symptoms immediately stop.
Western Animation
- Dude, That's My Ghost!: In "Sports Hero", Billy Joe Cobra decides to microwave himself to alter his molecular structure...and all he does is make himself sick. He cures himself of this by vomiting all his poisoned Ectoplasm into Kleet's shorts.
- Futurama: "My Three Suns": Fry accidentally drinks the Emperor of a civilization of sentient liquids, which makes him the new Emperor, and also puts a massive target on his back, especially when it turns out that the old Emperor is still alive inside of him. In order to free the old Emperor, Bender convinces Fry that Leela has been horribly murdered, so that the Emperor can escape through Fry's tear ducts. This fails when a perfectly healthy Leela arrives after Fry cries out two drops, so they go for plan B: force Fry to cry by giving him a vicious beating.
- The Legend of Korra: At the end of season three, the bad guys inject Korra with what's implied to be mercury in order to induce her Avatar state and then immediately kill her in it, ending the Avatar reincarnation cycle. While a friendly metalbender manages to bend most of the stuff out of her body to save her life, a good chunk of it remains inside her until well into season four, severely limiting her bending, until she manages to bend it out of herself with the guidance of Toph Beifong, the original metalbender.
- The Owl House: In the second special "For the Future", Raine Whispers gets possessed by Belos in order to manipulate the Collector. Once the Collector tells him about the Titan's heart in "Watching and Dreaming", Belos travels to the Emperor's Castle to use the heart to increase his own power. Along the way, Raine tries to fight off Belos from within their body. Though initially unsuccessful, they eventually use whistling magic to expel Belos from their body upon arriving at the castle.
- Quack Pack: The episode "The Germinator" sees the mad doctor Augustus Tobar shrink himself to the size of a germ and infiltrate Donald Duck's body in order to carry out his mass-infection plan at a baseball stadium. When the triplets are likewise shrunk, they traverse their uncle's body and thwart Tobar's plot. They then convince Daisy (via Donald's headspace) to read Donald his favorite book so he can cry the triplets and Tobar out. If we go by the "foreign invaders" label that one of Donald's cells calls the triplets (and by extension Tobar), then this trope applies to Donald crying out the "poison" in his body.
Real Life
- Many plants in the Amazon Rainforest produce toxic alkaloids in their leaves, nuts, and fruit. Animals that eat these like macaws, tapirs, and monkeys will then consume wet clay soil. The clay will bind to the toxins in their stomachs, preventing the toxins from being absorbed into their bodies and instead allow them to pass harmlessly through the animal's gut and get excreted in their feces.
- Ever had food poisoning? Ever spent hours in the bathroom hoping it's over only for the next wave to hit as soon as you stand up? That's this trope in play. When you eat something your body doesn't like, it tries to get rid of it as fast as possible.
