The Big Necessity Read Free

write about the dreadful sanitation in the far-eastern Russian isle of Sakhalin. And Sigmund Freud thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity. In the foreword to
Scatologic Rites of All Nations
, an impressive ethnography of excrement by the amateur anthropologist—and U.S. army captain—John Bourke, Freud wrote that “to make [the role of excretions in human life] more accessible . . . is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.”
    Solving sanitation is also a noble pursuit, if the number of royals who are interested in it is an indication: Prince Charles of the House of Windsor cleans his wastewater naturally by sending it slowly through apond filled with reeds. King Bhumibol of Thailand holds a patent for a wastewater aerator, making him the only patent-holding monarch in the world. Prince Willem-Alexander of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, leads the UN’s sanitation advisory body. It takes a brave academic to address it, but the ones who do rise to the occasion, producing papers like “My Baby Doesn’t Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust,” by the psychologists Trevor Case, Betty Repacholi, and Richard Stevenson; or “The Scatological Rites of Burglars” by Albert B. Friedman, a noted professor of medieval literature, who must have been tickled to learn that the housebreaker’s habit of leaving a foul deposit is probably an ancient custom, and was alluded to in seventeenth-century German literature.
    If the cultural standing of excrement doesn’t convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates that can make plants grow and also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them I don’t like to call it “waste,” when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when in a dried powdered form known as
poudrette
it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the eighteenth-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool (London’s Wellcome Library holds a 150-year-old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him if he’d like a fork). They were also fond of prescribing it: excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily and wrote that he couldn’t understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.
    This may seem like quackery, except that the fecal transplant is becoming an increasingly common procedure in modern medicine, used to treat severe bacterial infections such as
Clostridium difficile
, known by tabloids as a “superbug” because of its resistance to many antibiotic remedies. For the worst-suffering cases, doctors can now prescribe an enema—mixed with milk or saline solution—of a close relative’sdisease-free feces, whose bacterial fauna somehow defeat the superbug with dramatic effect. (Ninety percent of patients given fecal transfusions recover.) An eighty-three-year-old Scottish granny named Ethel McEwen, freshly cured by a dose provided by her daughter, said it wasn’t much different from a blood or kidney transplant, and anyway, “it’s not like they put it on a plate and have you eat it. You don’t ever see or smell a thing.”
    My sales technique nearly always worked. One evening over beer, an Indian novelist asked with seemingly bored politeness what I was working on, then talked for an hour of New Zealand “long-drops” (deep pit latrines) and whether it is acceptable to answer the phone while on the toilet, a modern question of etiquette that