Any urine place in England was nationalised in the 17th century so the King’s technicians could gather enough nitrates for gunpowder etc.
As for the premise of the thread, of course they didn’t. Most people from Pericles’ Athens through Caesar’s Rome to the modern era did their business in private, Mainly in buckets disposed of badly.
I was told by someone that in the 1960s he saw Chinese peasants defecating in the fields as they worked, but that’s not typical of the Chinese ( however ludicrously, people who resentfully bang on about European filthiness in the Middle Ages to a demented exaggeration, generally ignore the fact the much larger cities of the Far and Near East have not extensive ancient sewer systems, certainly not to Roman standards ).
The White House only got running water in 1833, rather late for the residences of the wealthy. Indoor Toilets arrived 1902.
And I remember a few years back, the cities of the West Coast, every time the great storm drains flooded from the downpour, a mighty wash occurred, sweeping the numerous deposits of the homeless and normal people ( San Francisco is proud of the Western record for mass pooping in public spaces, although India may have a greater tonnage on the streets ), and separately uplifting the contents of the sewers to quietly flow down to the wild Pacific Sea. White House Plumbing
Certainly different cultures had different levels of organization at different times. But even Wikipedia’s history section of night soil has examples from around the world, including the Americas. Japan may have learned from China, but it has a long history. Here’s an article about night soil collectors in 19th century America. Another one for Victorian England. I’ve found references to Athens and Rome as well as many areas in Asia.
Emperor Vespasian imposed a tax on the distribution of urine from public urinals. “Money does not stink” is attributed to him in response to his son’s comment on the less than aesthetic nature of the tax. In several romance languages, a word for public urinals is derived from his name - French “vespasienne”.
Canada started trying to impose sewage treatment on its relatively modern cities over the last few decades. While sewage treatment is pretty routine (just like the USA) there are/were some cities where the older areas did not treat their waste products. Montreal (or was it Quebec City?) just flushed it into the St. Lawrence (helps to have a nice current to haul it away). The CBC did a program about 20 years ago where they flushed a dye pack down a public toilet near the waterfront in Halifax and a few minutes later observed a coloured plume in the harbor. Victoria BC, IIRC still thinks it’s OK to flush some of their waste out to sea; it comes out a pipe deep in the strait south of the island and so is spread a far distance by the tidal current. Then there’s cities like Winnipeg where storm and sewage drains are combined in the old city - so when there’s a seriously heavy downpour, the sewage plant overflows and raw sewage ends up in the river, fortunately downstream from them but not from other communities.
I suspect some US and European cities have similar issues.
Lots of major US cities still have combined sewers. The one I live near, for example. It has no plans to fix this. They just keep upgrading the sewer capacity to handle runoff and when stuff inevitably overflows, they just pay the fines.
SF had a combined sewer. No big rush to do anything about it - until the effort got funded.
The area near the discharge point was not developed until the late 40’s.
Once there was a huge sum of money involved, all kinds of people became quite earnest in their resolve to clean up. As it were.
An example of the new system: When it comes to the attention of TPTB that a storm drain is being used as an industrial waste disposal, the city springs into action and paints a cute graphic:
The Indus Valley Civilization, which was a Bronze Age civilization (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 BCE) had the world’s earliest known system of flush toilets. With a number of courtyard houses having both a washing platform and a dedicated toilet / waste disposal hole. The toilet holes would be flushed by emptying a jar of water, drawn from the house’s central well, through a clay brick pipe and into a shared brick drain, that would feed into an adjacent soakpit (cesspit).
Certainly there are exceptions. The Indian Viceroy launched a small pointless invasion of Tibet, to the horror of the British and most other governments. It didn’t achieve much, not many deaths, and they parted friends; but at the town of Phari the invaders were disgruntled that the excrement of ages was so high they had to cut holes through it to reach the front doors.
First, San Francisco still has combined sewers, with no plans to change them. Here is a cite from this year. There are some efforts to limit the amount of storm water into the sewer so that it doesn’t overflow the system, but no plans to build a separate storm water drain system.
Second, those cute signs are designed to keep individual citizens from dumping motor oil or other toxic substances into the drains, not to counteract industrial waste disposal. If you live in SF and know of any industrial waste disposal into the storm drains, please call 311 and report it.
One of the mandates of Friends of the Urban Forest in SF, with which I am a volunteer, is to reduce the amount of runoff going into the sewers by replacing as much concrete as possible either with sidewalk tree basins or with sidewalk gardens, that allow rainwater to soak into the ground and replenish the water table. It’s a long job, but every bit helps.
Using of night soil was also practiced in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, where feces transporters would move the excrement by canoes to fields as a fertilizer.
I am surprised how generally people of older times did not get disgusted. Either disgust about feces isn’t in our natures (our primate relatives and retards play with feces all the time), or else people were forced to put up with so much filth. But why to put up? Why generally every amenity that made our lives more comfortable must have arisen after the Industrial Revolution? Surely some technology was in existence much before that point, yet people were content to the ways of the past for centuries. They didn’t bother fixing the sewage problem.
Again Jews were a step ahead. God commanded the Israelites in the Old Testament, when on a campain, to have a spade with them, in order to bury their excrement. Generally why Western Europe was surprisingly backwards in matters of hygiene, while other cultures, some of them supposedly primitive and some much more ancient, cared more about it? I blame christianity, which demonized cleanliness and concern for the body. Even bathing the body was a gateway to sin, prostitution, etc in medieval christians’ eyes.
Which ? The Middle East didn’t smell that fragrant until 100 years ago. Plus many places had flies, lots of flies.
No. Most European towns of the High Middle Ages had public baths, and officials called Scavengers [ like Customs Officers ] who directed, however insufficiently, the disposal of waste.
Even some orders of monks bathed regularly. It was only the occasional religious who forewent cleanliness, such as Thomas A’Becket. But he was a traitor.
That’s a far cry from the scene in Slumdog Millionaire where the outdoor toilets had huge piles of human waste underneath them. The stench must have been horrendous.:eek:
My understanding that the unusually high proportion of Jews in the fur trade to this day dates from the Christian medieval period, in which every Guild (and profession) was forbidden to Jews, except finance (or usury, depending on who you ask) and the truly rank necessary ones–rank physically this time, not doctrinally–such as tanning.
If not bathing had been the norm, Isabella’s vow to not bathe or change undergarments until Granada fell would have gone unnoticed rather than serving as the trigger for five-centuries’ worth of jokes about the Moors surrendering to her eau-de-unwashed and not her troops.
Common in Australia until the early 20th century. Generally shipped by cesspit cleaners / nightsoil men to, mainly Chinese, market gardeners on the edge of towns. There was also a government sewage farm in Sydney, near Mascot Airport, that experimented with diverting the waste stream to industrial scale farmlands, on the logic that it generated profits and reduced the need to upgrade infrastructure.