PRIVIES, SPIDERS, WORMS, AND WEEDS JOHN H. FELTS* Long before the discovery of bacteria and the rise of trash mountains in affluent societies, the importance of waste management was recognized by the early Hebrews who were instructed in Deuteronomy 23:12-14 to have a place outside the camp and you shall go to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excretement. Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to save you and give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you. Two and a half millennia later, such sticks survive for infantrymen in the U.S. Army as entrenching tools, good for digging foxholes, slit trenches, outdoor latrines, and ditches. While these instructions were necessary to maintain ritual purity, efficient disposal of excreta was likewise essential if offensive odors were to be avoided. Primitive societies must have recognized the need for running water for cleanliness, indoors and out. The rise, expansion, and longevity ofthe Roman empire maybe largely attributed to its engineers, whose aqueducts , sewers, and roads can still be examined from Ephesus on the Aegean to Britain. When the empire fell, these systems were not kept up, and its civilization inevitably declined. During the rise of the next great empire, the Elizabethan courtier, Sir John Harington, designed a flush toilet similar to our modern devices, but Britain would remain content for more than three centuries to dispose of her waste in her streets or dump it into her rivers, making the Thames at London into a cesspool [1-3] . Harington's book about his invention is also a great repository of scatological humor from both his time and antiquity, an amusement still popular in modern Britain [2, 4]. Before Harington and after, the English people used chamber pots and built as integral parts of castle walls privies and latrines called garderobes, corbeled so that they *Department of Internal Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Correspondence: 3335 Paddington Lane, Winston-Salem, NC 27106.© 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/98/4201-1081$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 42, 1 ¦ Autumn 1998 | 75 could empty into moats and streams or directly onto the ground if watercourses were absent. At times drainage from gutters or waste water from the kitchen was used for flushing. In towns and cities where only the most prosperous had indoor toilets, preferably overhanging streams or emptying into cellars, privies were usually in stable yards [2, 5, 6]. Bacteriology and parasitology would have to emerge before resistance to the new would be overcome and an increasingly prosperous society be willing to improve its plumbing. During Victorian times, toilets and chamber pots became exuberant and flamboyant, as the rich sought to outdo each other in the ornateness and luxuriousness of their facilities [2] . Public concern about cholera epidemics and contaminated water supplies eventually forced London to clean up its water supply, establish the modern plumbing industry, and introduce "crapper" into the language in recognition of Sir Thomas Crapper, an early tycoon of waste management [2, 3, 7]. Today, as outside toilets have become rare in the countryside, historical preservationists with pen and camera have invaded ancient castles, Victorian mansions, and the Cotswolds to capture another era on paper and on film [2, 4]. Across the Atlantic the rapidly growing United States was soon dotted with outdoor privies, variously called backhouses, jakes, and necessary houses (as at Washington's Mount Vernon) , and by a host of euphemisms. With urbanization and the decline of the family farm, the landscape changed; privies came to infer inferior social status and emphasize class distinction, particularly in a South struggling with the collapse of its semifeudal , slave-based plantation economy. There the textile industry was the first step in industrialization, characteristically in villages at the fall-line, where cheap and abundant water power could be had. Often, however, mill owners could not afford costly water and sewer systems or did not...
Read full abstract
Jul 28, 2024
John Dunham + 1
Open Access
