I just finished reading a rather interesting book, (“The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.” by Rose Baker) on the subject, and was curious- historically, were latrines ever the standard in villages/cities/etc in any part of the world? Or did people generally just go to the nearby field?
My father bought a house near Cambridge in the 1960s that had no plumbing apart from a cold water tap in the kitchen. His garden was highly fertile from a couple of centuries of chamber pots being emptied over it and dug in.
People with means shat in a bucket and tossed it into the street. Poor people just shat in the street.
Fun facts: In the 1800s, sewers were what we now call “combined sewers”, that is, they carried away both human sewage and storm water, in addition to all the horse excrement in the streets. It’s much better today when we have a separation between “sanitary sewers” and “storm sewers”, because we can treat the water differently before releasing it back into creeks and rivers, but it was irrelevant back then because nobody treated waste water anyway. On the other hand, people had to wait for rain to come and “flush” the filth from the streets. Converting all those combined sewers into separate sanitary and storm sewers has been a 150 year effort that is still ongoing.
The “Great Vine” at Hampton Court is a grapevine that covers about an acre. The notes beside it say it either grows from a rich deposit from when the river flowed by there, or more likely, an old cesspit. If so, it seems some buildings made an effort to collect and dispose of material efficiently.
As recently as the 1990s, in China, I saw villages that had a central latrine, whose contents were collected and distributed as field fertilizer every morning. So, I presume that the centralization of defecation emerged along with the discovery that it had agricultural utility in a settled economy…
There is a word for it in Nairobi – “Flying toilets”. There, and probably other cities, people shit into plastic bags, and throw them somewhere, anywhere, as for away as possible. The irony of the economic imperative reflected by the technological existence of plastic bags but not sanitary plumbing in the third world.
Never mind open defecation. I am just thankful we live in a world with plentiful toilet paper. Options before that were less than optimal.
In days of old when knights were bold and toilets weren’t invented
They left their load beside the road and walked away contented
It’s not just fecal matter that’s useful. I think people used urine for tanning leather and possibly other purposes but I’m not doing the Google search to confirm that.
You let urine sit for a bit and age, then it’s useful for degreasing/cleaning and has some bleaching effect well as softening hides during the tanning process. Allowed to age, the urea in urine turns into ammonia, which is still used for cleaning purposes today. It was also used while dying fabric, and for awhile a component of urine was extracted for gunpowder manufacture.
So piss used to be an important raw material. Supposedly, in ancient Rome textile and tanning operations used to provide pots for the public to piss in as a means of obtaining the raw material.
Thus “not having a pot to piss in” to designate the poorest of the poor. You couldn’t even afford the means to sell your own urine.
Yes, urine was very useful for tanning (as was dog muck. Which is a polite way to say “shit”). Alchemists boiled urine for its phosphorus, too ; and it was also used in the fabrication of saltpeter for gunpowder.
It is worth noting that the same kind of people who currently resist government medicare made every attempt to prevent the installation of municipal sewage. I hve tried in vain to find a citation for this. My source was from an exhibit a number of years ago at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal where it was mentioned in one of the legends. IIRC, the landlords in Baltimore were especially resistant since their real estate taxes would go up to mosly benefit their tenants.
That also went on in the modern era and Victorian England. Piss used to be a valuable resource. Heartbreaking, how these days it seems we just piss it all away… 
In days of old when knights were bold and paper wasn’t invented
They wiped their ass with leaves of grass that left them nicely scented
“Night soil” was valuable as fertilizer. You wanted to make it collectible. That doesn’t mean you wandered in from the field, necessarily, but random droppings did nobody any good. Most cultures had an organized way of collecting and moving it.
The Rohm and Haas Company (now a Dow subsidiary) was started by Dr. Otto Rohm, a recent arrival from Germany, and Mr. Otto Haas, a succesful merchant, with a product intended to replace canine byproducts in the tanning industry. According to company legends, convincing a friend of Mr. Haas’ to try the new product wasn’t easy, but success went beyond expectations. The product (two of whose grandchild recipes were still made in the factory where I worked for two years in the early 2000s) performed satisfactorily; while it reeked by modern standards, it smelled a lot less bad than the kennels and didn’t bite.
Human waste became important in the manufacture of gunpowder in the 1800s. Composting of waste could produce a nitrate rich mixture in less than year used to produce potassium nitrate. People may have liked the concept of having the crap hauled away after there was a practical motivation to start doing so. More likely there wasn’t a practical alternative until the industrial revolution allowed the creation of a sewage infrastructure.
Cite, please? (China is the only country I’ve ever heard of, doing that on any organized level).
This makes think of something else that sounds strange to modern ears: Sweden made the earth in cowsheds the king’s property. Not human waste, but related enough for me to mention.
I originally read it here and the followup “poopy dirt” sounded silly enough that I remember it.
Yes, we have a name for that: “dysentery” (or Cholera).