You’re older than you think you are—three-quarters of a year older, to be exact. Your life began at conception. Even as a single cell you were completely yourself, with a unique genetic code, all your talents and bad manners already pre-programmed. And your neighbour was completely himself, as was your auntie purely herself. Long before you were delivered, a number of far-reaching alterations took place. First you looked like a paramecium, then like a tadpole, and later like a monkey. A tail came and went. Submerged in the amniotic fluid, you used your mother as a snorkel, embryonic brains filling themselves with embryonic thoughts. You experienced more in your first months than in the rest of your whole life; by the time you were born the most exciting things were already behind you.
But that doesn’t count. You’ve only been a member of humanity since your birth, since taking leave of your mother, coming into the world. Playing outdoors. Suddenly there you were. A miracle. To celebrate the festive opening of your life, your parents sent out cards. To say you were there, and what they thought your name should be. There was laughing and drinking, as there is at the beginning of anything new: the completion of a house, the presentation of a book, the launching of a rocket or a magazine, the incarnation of a god.
For nine months you lay like a turd in your mother’s body before being ejected, just like every other piece of excrement. But you no longer remember that. You missed the most important moment of your life. Nothing for it but to pay better attention later on, when the next most exciting moment comes: death. At least you can imagine what your beginning was like, though: the increasingly cramped feeling there inside, the growing realisation that you had to get out before it was too late, the world around you suddenly squeezing and squeezing, the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter until it made your eyes hurt. It was time to re-route your circulatory system to your lungs; your navel was disconnected and there you were, taking your first breath. No space travel or heroin can hold a candle to it.
You have no memory of this, but your mother’s memory more than makes up for it. While you were getting born she was giving birth. For her, too, the tension mounted, the fear of being torn apart, the necessity for drastic measures, followed by the catharsis: the delivery. It’s a secret women’s experience from which men are thought to be excluded. But men are not completely unfamiliar with delivery. Men also cherish the fruit of their innards. Men shit, too.
Shitting is childbirth on a small scale. In both cases, there’s something inside that has to be let out, before it’s too late. Given the fact that a friendly appeal to come out meets with deaf ears, the only choice is to resort to violence. Here an awkward construction has its revenge. It would have been so much better if our fruit had grown outside our bodies rather than inside. This isn’t as strange as it seems. It’s how trees do it.
Trees are smarter than people. Dangling from branches, their apples and pears grow freely in size until they’ve had enough, then they lazily drop to the ground. Thanks to this system, one girl tree can bring forth hundreds of fruits at once; a human girl complains if she has to bear twins. Dead leaves, old stamens and other waste simply yield to the force of gravity, just like the fruit. Birds also raise their embryos outside the body, sitting on their eggs. Rubbish is tossed out over the edge of the nest, and the young fly away when they’re ready to go. The worst place for a nest is in your belly. For something so stupid you’d have to be a mammal.
Of all the mammals, the human being is the most troublesome to bring into the world. Its head is too big. Try putting on a turtleneck sweater. You can barely get it over your head. So you can imagine what a bother it must have been to push that head through your mother’s cervix when you were born. Because of the disparity between the baby’s head and the mother’s pelvis, a human birth most resembles an attempt to push an apple through a funnel without making applesauce out of it. The apple brings it off with striking frequency, but the funnel sustains serious injuries. Sometime something tears, the bladder implodes, the pelvis collapses.
Not so very long ago, three out of every hundred Dutch women never left their childbed. But even if all goes well, the expulsion of a baby is a huge hassle. That huge hassle is what we call birth, although the term ‘delivery’ more aptly describes the situation. Sometimes even shitting can be another childbirth. Ironically enough, this is mainly true of the mother’s first bowel movement after the birth of her child, when the stomach muscles slacken and the rectum is still half unconscious from all the neighbouring violence. Usually, however, shitting a turd is a piece of cake compared with the delivery of a baby. Most of the time it’s just plain delightful, a childish pleasure, like messing about with tomato ketchup or writing your name with syrup. The pleasure is more in the production than in the product. You see that frequently with creative hobbies. A loom, with all its shafts and levers, is a great deal more beautiful than many of the lengths of cloth that artists make on it, and if I didn’t find honey so distasteful I would have started beekeeping long ago, with all that interesting traditional fuss and bother that goes into it. If shitting is a versatile activity that you can keep on refining all your life, the product, no matter how successful, is just something to be tossed away. Still warm from your body, it’s cruelly disowned like an illegitimate child. A legitimate child, on the other hand—a child you bore yourself—is something to love. In that case, the product is considerably nicer than the production. There doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it, since God drove Eve out of Paradise with the words, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’
With our big heads and our narrow birth canals, the Creator has been generous in His contribution to the sorrow of childbirth. What makes the whole thing even worse is the absence of cooperation on the part of the child. Excrement lets itself be driven out passively. By growing, both child and turd give a clear sign that they need to evacuate, but the actual ejection falls entirely on the body. In the absence of block and tackle, hook and eye, or wheel and axle, it’s all a matter of pushing. And that depends on muscle power. The contents are pushed from the uterus or the rectum like toothpaste from a tube. The fingers needed for squeezing are built into the walls. At the same time, muscles in the abdominal wall and the diaphragm put the abdominal cavity under pressure. To underscore the similarity between the mechanics of childbirth and defecation, it might not be a bad idea to speak of labour when referring to defecation. Biologists use the term ‘giant migrating contractions’, when the sphincter muscles squeeze the large intestine almost completely shut in some places. These contractions shift along a great distance, forcefully pushing the contents towards the exit. This happens only about six times a day, usually shortly after rising, after meals, and after coffee or tea. The sphincters squeeze during the rest of the day as well, but these haustral contractions aren’t nearly as deep or as fast. Their purpose is not to propel the contents forward but to mix and knead it, so that all the bits of pulp come in close contact with the wall in order to exchange substances. Giant migrating contractions move at a speed of one centimetre per second. When enough shit is ready, it’s stored at the end of the large intestine. The rectum itself is empty for the most of the day. When it is full it swells up, which comes to the attention of the stretch receptors in the rectal wall. If there are 60 to 100 millilitres of faeces in the rectum, the receptors send a message to the nervous system: you feel the need to go. Sometimes you feel it ten minutes after you’ve eaten, when your food couldn’t possibly have reached your rectum yet. That means your full stomach has made a preliminary announcement with the help of hormones such as gastrin. You can answer the call of nature immediately, but if you’re in a meeting or stuck in rush hour traffic it might be wiser to hold off for a little while. When that happens the turd usually slips back into its limbo, the S-curve between the large intestine and the rectum, the sigmoid. But don’t get carried away. If the amount of shit in the rectum rises to more than 250 to 400 millilitres, the dikes will burst, whether you like it or not.
Timing your defecation is a matter of cooperation between your head and your belly. As long as the dikes can easily hold back the tide, the head can exercise veto rights—to a certain extent. It can say nyet to the general consensus. Likewise, there’s no way you can defecate if your belly doesn’t feel like it. Shitting follows an internal rhythm, like breathing, sleeping and menstruating. A healthy belly likes to do it once a day, more or less synchronous with other bodily functions. But even if you shit twice a day, or twice a week, you can still live to be a hundred. John Harvey Kellogg thought three to four times a day was a minimum requirement for staying healthy. The only way normal mortals could achieve something like that was by irrigating the intestines between bowel movements. Whether this practice could assure you of a hundred-year lifespan is doubtful. On the other hand, according to Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall in End Product, the man who shat only on Saturday evenings, and then never more than every other week, lived to be seventy-seven. He did that for nineteen years. But there are limits. After being held in for three weeks, the shit gets so compacted that it can only be prised out with the help of an instrument or an operation. The record for not shitting, by the way, is held by Adam and Eve in Paradise. According to the biblical scholars, they didn’t have to defecate because their food was immaculate. There are others who disagree. They argue that Adam and Eve were created with full intestines, just as they were made with navels, because the whole world was created with a prehistory. Long before this question arose among theologians, the Essenes, a Jewish sect, may very well have imitated Adam and Eve. The Essenes lived in model communes where everything was held in common and the love of God was regarded as the greatest wealth. According to the Roman philosopher Porphyry, ‘they had such simple, sober eating habits that they did not have to defecate until the seventh day after partaking of their food, and they spent that day singing hymns to God.’ Just picture it, the sect members, their thighs clamped together for days, their heads getting redder and redder from grim-faced fanaticism.
In modern times, the place to look for faecal suppression is the animal kingdom, although you might not imagine it with all those dogs around. The sloth is laziest in this respect. This South American creature sleeps fifteen hours a day, but to suggest that it therefore must be awake for the nine remaining hours is overdoing it. A sloth is never really awake. Usually it just hangs around from branches, upside down, and if it moves at all it does it in slow motion. Other than that, it has hardly any habits; a sloth just doesn’t have them. Except for one: once a week it comes down to the ground from the leafy canopy to defecate and urinate at the foot of its tree. In this way, according to foresters, it keeps from fouling itself. Others say it does this to fertilise its tree, or to prevent the sound of shit falling on the leaves from revealing its location. In any case, it doesn’t have to go more frequently on account of its slow digestion. Something similar happens with hibernating bears. Thanks to a good solid plug of fur and shit, their anuses are shut for months and they don’t have to get out of bed to defecate or urinate. Human beings also have a splendid biological mechanism for this, which wasn’t discovered until 2012. At night your bladder is simply able to hold more urine. There’s less of the protein connexin-43 in the bladder wall, which makes the bladder wall relax. In addition, the kidneys make less urine at night. Unfortunately, this mechanism starts faltering as a person ages, so old people end up breaking their hips at night while stumbling to the loo.
Even the best device fails when the fuses blow. When you’re really terrified you pee in your pants. Shortly before a school exam, when an explosion occurs nearby, or after a knock on the door that might mean your death, staying dry is a tremendous struggle. The brains in your intestines, egged on by hormones like histamine and prostaglandin, push aside the brains in the head and take full charge. It’s as if your body had risen up in revolt against your mind. There are infamous stories of the soldiers in the trenches during the First World War who stood with their feet in the mud and their legs in their own shit, which did not promote fighting efficiency. Yet that was exactly what the body intended. In the face of great danger, hormones and nerves shift the body over to a state of war. All efforts are then directed towards either fight or flight. Organs that have nothing to contribute to the cause, such as the intestines, are temporarily cut off from blood and other provisions. This happens to many game. An antelope shits its brains out at the sight of an oncoming lion. It quite literally drops its ballast. An antelope turd may not weigh much, but it can mean the difference between life and death if the animal can run just a little faster without it. For birds, dropping ballast when danger approaches is even more advantageous. Ralph Lewin knew an ecologist in Malaysia who studied the internal parasites of birds. In order to collect them, all he had to do was put the host birds in a plastic bag for a short period of time and the parasites would appear in a wave of anxiety excrement. But the prize for the most excellent mechanism goes to the caterpillars of the skipper butterfly. When danger threatens, they shit with such force that it makes their attacker run away. Their poo shoots a metre and a half into the air. If we could do that, relative to our body length, we’d be shitting a distance of sixty metres.
Shitting yourself from fear has a sad parallel in the bearing of a child. While the English soldiers were befouling themselves during the liberation of the European continent in World War II, their wives in London were running a greater risk of having miscarriages during the V1 and V2 bombings. In both cases, stress hormones and traumas disrupted their bodies’ normal operation.
‘Normal’ defecation is something most people don’t know anything about due to a lack of examples. Occasionally you get to see the birth of a child on TV, or photos that make the rounds during a visit to a new mother. But images of a session of shitting would chase viewers or visitors away. Even when you’re alone it’s hard to actually see how shitting works. That accounts for all the fussing and fumbling. The first lesson at every trade school was: always watch what you’re doing. Keep an eye on the work at hand and make sure you’ve assumed the right position. To start off, watch how the animals do it. Many of them look as if they were giving birth when they’re shitting. They squat with their tail in the air. This is the easiest way for a turd or a young to slip out. You can tell from its physical attitude that your cat is about to take a shit, which is intended for that one purpose alone. Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall refer to two German researchers who inserted electrodes into the brains of cats. When they stimulated the septum pellucidum and then the stria terminalis, the cats assumed the proper position and defecated. ‘This is very Prussian. Unfortunately, when the shocks were given in reverse, the cats defecated, then assumed the defecatory posture.’
Human beings, with their upright gait, are cut out for squatting. Primitive peoples squatted at every opportunity, and many Asian people still do. In the West, people revert to the four-footed stage of evolution. They sit on furniture with four legs all day long, and when they go outside they move around in a chair on four wheels, their car. This way of sitting takes its revenge when they relieve themselves of a child or a turd. Giving birth on a chair, as was customary in earlier times, is a better position than giving birth in a bed, but it’s still more awkward than giving birth while squatting. Shitting in bed is not something you do voluntarily; it’s generally seen as an uncomfortable experience. But even the most ordinary toilet gets in the way of the defecation process. When you sit, passing a turd is hampered by the puborectalis muscle. When relaxed, this muscle causes a twist to form in the rectum, thereby dividing it into three compartments. The partitions bear the weight of the faecal column in the intestine in order to relieve the anal sphincter. So you can easily remain housebroken in a standing or seated position. A human being squats naturally in order to shit. In this position the levator ani muscle automatically swings into action: the twist in the intestines slackens, the buttocks spread apart, and the contents easily slide out. In Europe the French have known this for a long time. They retained the squat toilet, so feared by tourists, with its two footsteps on either side of the drainage hole. As a tourist this is where you really felt like a foreigner because of the fear of falling over; you were never sure whether the door handle you were clinging to would hold. But it’s all a question of practice. Fanatical proponents of squat defecation even manage to shit by squatting on the upper edge of an ordinary toilet (with the seat raised). They insist that shitting while sitting leads to constipation, haemorrhoids, appendicitis, incontinence, irritable bowel syndrome, enlarged prostate and intestinal cancer. Less fanatic followers place a foot stool in front of their ordinary toilet bowl to imitate a squatting posture. For the beginner, it’s enough to place the newspaper (which you wanted to read anyway) on the floor so you have to bend way over in order to fulfil two needs satisfactorily at the same time. Sitting straight up on the toilet and reading the newspaper is an outgrowth of our movement-impoverished culture. Instead of football and running, the first thing our children should be taught in their school gymnastics classes is how to squat. Then they’d be able to relieve themselves anywhere, without a chair or a toilet bowl. It’s a mystery why something as unhealthy as defecating sitting down has become the norm in our health-advice-infested world, but one explanation is unavoidable: in our zeal to get something as filthy as a turd into the toilet as fast as possible, we’ve forgotten how to get the same turd out of our bodies with the same speed. But you’re never too old to learn. Lower your arse as far as you can, with your legs spread wide and your arms wrapped around your knees for balance. In this way your thighs automatically press against your lower body to help push the shit out. Good luck!
German soldiers even had rules for shitting during the First World War: not from the side but in the ‘squatting position’.
Having reached the rectum after its long journey, the turd is ready and wants to get out. But it’s not quite that easy. Usually it comes up against a closed door: the anus. And before it reaches the back door itself, the shit has to pass through the gateway to the anal canal, where the intestine bores through the muscular pelvic floor. The twist in the puborectalis muscle serves as a storm door. When it pulls the intestine forward it forms a sharp 80-degree angle. Should any shit slip through anyway, it gets sent back like a truant child. This is where the anal canal makes use of a good trick: it squeezes together at the exit more often than at the entrance. The back door itself shuts as firmly as the cap of a tube, except that instead of a twist-off cap there’s a sphincter muscle. No turd, no drip, no cloud of gas can escape. ‘Poems are made by fools like me,’ urologist Victor Marshall taught his students in order to impart a bit of respect for the anus, ‘but only God can make a sphincter.’ The anal sphincter is made with a double wall. The inner wall is just the extension of the intestinal sphincters. Like every smooth muscle, the action of the innermost sphincter is involuntary. It simply relaxes as soon as a sufficient amount of shit presents itself. But most of the time it keeps itself tightly closed, a condition of which it never tires. The outermost sphincter, on the other hand, is dead beat after a minute of squeezing. Like all true striated muscles its action is voluntary, although it’s sometimes disobedient.
Once your brain has granted permission, the puborectalis muscle relaxes, the twist in the rectum slackens to a 125-degree angle, and the pelvis drops, anus and all. Now the pelvic floor is like a hungry funnel, ready to receive the turd and push it out with the help of the diaphragm muscles and the muscles of the abdominal wall. But sometimes something gets in the way. Oncoming traffic. That’s what happened to a carpenter’s apprentice from Great Yarmouth in around 1725. According to an article in Philosophical Transactions with the telling title ‘An Account of a Fork Put up the Anus, that Was Afterwards Drawn Out Through the Buttock’, he reported to Mr John Ranby, Surgeon F.R.S., with the tines of a fork protruding from his bottom.
Being costive, he put the said Fork up his Fundament, thinking by that Means to help himself, but unfortunately it slipt up so far, that he could not recover it again. It is 6 Inches and a half long, a long Pocket-Fork; the Handle is Ivory, but is dyed of a very dark-brown Colour; the Iron Part is very black and smooth, but not rusty.
In 1865, fellow surgeon T. J. Ashton put together a whole list of foreign bodies that had been found lodged in people’s rectums. There are enough here to start a well-stocked department store of household articles. ‘Bottles, pots, cups, a knitting-sheath, a shuttle with its roll of yarn, a pig’s tail, ferrules, rings, pieces of wood, ivory, metal, horn, cork, bone, &c.’ You can’t make this stuff up. There’s nothing too preposterous that hasn’t been found in an intestine.
Nolet, surgeon to the Marine Hospital at Brest, relates the case of a monk, who, in order to cure himself of a violent colic, introduced into the rectum a bottle of Hungary wine, having previously made a hole through the cork to permit the fluid to flow into the intestine. In his desire to accomplish his object, he pushed the bottle so far that it completely entered the gut. Various means were tried to remove it without effecting the object; at last, a boy, between eight and nine years of age, succeeded in introducing his hand into the bowel, and withdrew the bottle.
The deadliest object turns out to have been a vegetable. In June 1842, a sixty-year-old man died on the way to the infirmary as a result of having eaten too many dried peas six days earlier.
On examining the body after death upwards of a pint of grey peas was found in the rectum: they had been swallowed without mastication, and had undergone no alteration in passing through the alimentary canal, except becoming swollen by warmth and the absorption of moisture. The urethra was pressed upon, and he had had retention of urine for four days. The bladder was enormously distended, its apex reaching the umbilicus, and its base nearly filling the brim of the pelvis.
Usually the obstacle at the back door is less foreign than you would wish it to be. Your body made it itself. It’s your own fault. If your body were a cinema or a theatre, there isn’t a fire brigade in the world that would tolerate such an obstacle. Fire isn’t likely to break out in an intestine, not even after you’ve eaten the hottest peppers, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. The name of the obstacle sounds ominous enough: haemorrhoid. A haemorrhoid is a varicose vein that’s stuck in your arse. Haemorrhoids are the price we pay for the pride we take in walking erect. A respectable four-legged animal doesn’t have varicose veins, let alone haemorrhoids, but if you stand up straight like a human being it means your heart is a long way from your toes, so the blood pressure has to be accelerated. This is more than the valves in the veins can bear. They tear, blood gets backed up, and your skin starts looking like a river delta. When this kind of twisted blood vessel forms in your anus it becomes fused with the intestinal covering and some of the connective tissue, resulting in a haemorrhoid. A quadruped like a dog is never bothered by such things. Dogs carelessly strew the streets with their shit until the day they die. A dog’s backside is more or less the high point of its body. Its rear end is not only behind but also above its heart. Blood can never get stuck there. Our backsides are too low. There ought to be valves in the blood vessels in our bottoms, but in the process of learning to walk upright evolution forgot to include them. As compensation, humans have at their disposal a friendly member of the haemorrhoid family, the haemorrhoidal plexus, which, like its relatives, consists of twisted veins and can swell up with blood. It doesn’t do this to torment you, however, but to seal off the last chinks in the closed anus.
You can dismiss a foreign object or a haemorrhoid as an incident that impedes traffic, like a jack-knifed lorry or temporary roadwork. But the flow can also be blocked by the system itself, as in the case of bumper-to-bumper traffic, when it’s the cars themselves that slow each other down. Slow-moving and stationary traffic in the intestines is called constipation. It’s a self-reinforcing process. It begins with a sluggish turd. Because the turd stays in the intestines for a long time, a great deal of water is extracted from it. That makes it hard. Hard turds don’t make any headway. They chafe against the intestinal walls and crunch at the curves. This causes new delays, more dehydration, congestion, and faces flushed from all the ineffective straining on the toilet. Shitting starts to look as terrifying as a breach birth.
Constipation is sometimes the fault of the intestine. The muscles are too slack, a narrowing has occurred, or the second brain has gone to sleep. That’s a matter for the doctor. But just as it is with traffic, the fault lies more often with the people who use the roadway than with the roadway itself. Tough, misshapen turds hold up intestinal traffic. Eating fibre helps. When turds are softened by well-lubricated fibre, they move along at a nice clip and fill the toilet bowl, with time to spare.
Even if you haven’t done anything wrong (as far as you know), sooner or later every drain gets clogged. And in one out of seven people constipation is a chronic condition. The symptoms are pain and straining, small pellets, low success frequency (fewer than three times a week), and the feeling after you’ve defecated that you’re still not empty. Time for the drain cleaner. Laxatives can stimulate the movement of the intestinal wall or improve the lubrication along the way. Most of them work on the basis of osmosis. They might contain magnesium compounds that increase the number of dissolved particles in the fluid of the large intestine. Because the fluids on both sides of the intestinal wall strive for an equal concentration of particles, the laxative retains water in the intestine. That makes the turds nice and creamy. But it’s not an ideal system. The extra water that is taken into the excrement causes valuable potassium salts to go to waste. A lack of potassium weakens all the muscles in the body, including those in the intestines, which ultimately results in the very constipation you’re trying to treat. According to stomach specialist E. Mathus from the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, what works best is a glass of lukewarm water first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, followed by coffee. ‘With a cigarette,’ he added in 1999, but even back then you couldn’t say that. As an alternative to a laxative or cigarette, according to George Drewry a hundred odd years earlier in CommonSense Management of the Stomach, there was always the enema.
The regular use of the enema syringe is of the utmost importance in these cases; for, as I have already pointed out, nothing can be more irrational than the practice of taking purgatives by the mouth to remove hardened matter distending the lower bowel, when the enema syringe furnishes us with a means of removing the source of obstruction safely and comfortably in ten minutes, without the use of any medicine whatever.
Rabelais would not have agreed with him. He knew of an even older and better method for driving a firmly entrenched piece of shit from an obdurate body: fear.
…for one of the symptoms and accidents of fear is, that it often opens the wicket of the cupboard wherein second-hand meat is kept for a time. Let’s illustrate this noble theme with some examples.
Messer Pantolfe de la Cassina of Siena, riding post from Rome, came to Chambery, and alighting at honest Vinet’s took one of the pitchforks in the stable; then turning to the innkeeper, said to him, ‘Da Roma in qua io non son andato del corpo. Di gratia piglia in mano questa forcha, et fa mi paura.’ (I have not had a stool since I left Rome. I pray thee take this pitchfork and fright me.) Vinet took it, and made several offers as if he would in good earnest have hit the signor, but all in vain; so the Sienese said to him, ‘Si tu non fai altramente, tu non fai nulla; pero sforzati di adoperarli piu guagliardamente.’ (If thou dost not go another way to work, thou hadst as good do nothing; therefore try to bestir thyself more briskly.) With this, Vinet lent him such a swinging stoater with the pitchfork souse between the neck and the collar of his jerkin, that down fell signor on the ground arsy versy, with his spindle shanks wide straggling over his poll. Then mine host sputtering, with a full-mouthed laugh, said to his guest, ‘By Beelzebub’s bumgut, much good may it do you, Signore Italiano. Take notice this is datum Camberiaci, given at Chambery. ‘Twas well the Sienese had untrussed his points and let down his drawers; for this physic worked with him as soon as he took it, and as copious was the evacuation as that of nine buffaloes and fourteen missificating arch-lubbers.’ Which operation being over, the mannerly Sienese courteously gave mine host a whole bushel of thanks, saying to him, ‘Io ti ringratio, bel messere; cosi facendo tu m’ ai esparmiata la speza d’un servitiale.’ (I thank thee, good landlord; by this thou hast e’en saved me the expense of a clyster.)
Serious or not, this kind of advice has its origin in another era, and in more than one respect. From the mediaeval nobility to the French courtiers and the Victorian middle class, people were obsessed by constipation. That’s hardly surprising when you consider what kind of food was being consumed: great chunks of meat, cauldrons of porridge, schools of fish, and broods of chickens, doused in heavy sauces and served in several courses. Intestines worked overtime until they finally threw in the towel. This did not leave their owners unmoved. While people of the twenty-first century are fanatical in their pursuit of health through healthy eating, those of earlier years hoped for a long and happy life by means of healthy evacuation. That’s what their herbals were all about, that was the focus of their doctors’ expensive advice. Gaunt adolescent girls were suffering from an intestinal problem, of course; anorexia nervosa was still an unknown condition. The focus wasn’t on what went in but what came out. Of all the lists of medicines, the list of purgatives was the longest—with a preference for rectal over oral administration.
This anal phase in medicine reached a high point in around 1900. After the discovery of a large number of pathogenic microbes, all bacteria were regarded with suspicion. And the large intestine was full of them! If that intestine were to become clogged with shit, the bacteria there could use it to brew poisonous substances that would race through the blood and threaten the entire body. ‘Auto-intoxication’ is what Charles Bouchard called it in 1887—‘self-poisoning’. Today we blame absence of exercise for everything, from baldness to cancer and dementia, but back then constipation was the mother of all maladies. It could lead to urinary tract infections, arthritis, headache, thyroid disorders, heart disease, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy and—oh, yes—cancer and baldness, of course. Eventually everyone would be able to tell by your skin that you were constipated, warned Dr Kellogg.
During the heyday of nudism, sandals, beating each other with birch branches and singing idiotic songs about the New Man (‘Awake!’), a regular War on the Bowels was declared in the early twentieth century. Popular magazines, polite conversation and entire libraries were filled with advice on how to fight constipation. Enemas were pimped with rubber tubes and bellows, yoghurt and cornflakes performed their first abdominal miracles, and advertising agencies got rich from the laxative commercials (‘If nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax’). True believers had their intestines shortened out of faecal fanaticism with the same ease that people today have their intestines re-routed round their stomachs as penance for their gluttony. But the intestinal trend faded with the Charleston after the roaring twenties. In 1930, a certain Dr W. H. Graves made a lot of noise with the claim that 90 per cent of all illnesses were caused by constipation, but it was too late. Looming on the horizon after the close of the anal age was the oral age. The rectum was promoted from ‘a useless and superfluous structure’ to ‘part of a wonderful, multifunctional, and still incompletely understood digestive tract’ with ‘marvellously varied bacterial flora by means of which we become an integral part of the ecosystem’.
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Shit can also be too thin. When that happens, that part of the magnificent, multifunctional alimentary canal has failed to understand itself completely and contains too much water. It’s just as if you’d taken a laxative. And often that’s exactly what happens. Besides the pharmacist, the greengrocer also sells outstanding laxatives, but without any instructions for use. Examples are apples, pears, prunes, rhubarb, blackberries, cherries, peaches and figs. And there’s a very good reason why fruits like cherries tend to loosen your bowels. If a cherry is eaten by a bird, the bird quickly shits out the pit before it can cause intestinal damage, so it remains capable of germination. Charles Darwin cultivated all kinds of seeds taken from bird faeces in order to understand the distribution of plants. But even in human intestines many seeds retain their strength. Whenever there’s a leakage of sewage containing human faeces, tomato plants sprout up without having been sown. Prune trees last longer, but the laxative effect is no less powerful. It really gets you moving.
If you can’t get to a toilet on time, you may be in for a foretaste of what the future could hold for you: incontinence. Due to age or illness, a small percentage of the earth’s population lose control of their pee, shit or intestinal gases. In the West, approximately 1 per cent of the population cannot hold their faeces. This is especially true of old women. Although something may be wrong with their muscles, it’s usually the nerves that give out first. Many people wonder whether this will be their fate as well. It’s all too easy to forget that we began our lives incontinent. A healthy baby shits and pees to its heart’s content whenever its intestine or bladder feels like it.
So why do we bring these filthy babies into the world? Because it’s been our habit for millions of years. The model for our babies comes from the time when our forefathers—the babies’ fore-forefathers—were still living in trees as monkeys. Carefree as the birds of the air, they spent their lives at a splendid height and freely let their shit drop all over the poor earth-dwellers below. Those creatures are much tidier. They only shit in certain places, or hurry away when they’re done. Now humans are earth-dwellers, too, and have wisely decided to clean up their act. But it isn’t easy. Controlled defecation has to be learned, like playing the piano—and there weren’t any pianos high up in the trees, either. Incidentally, many children master the piano before mastering their own sphincter. In the Netherlands alone, from 50,000 to 100,000 children attend the poo clinic because they keep having accidents. Or they hold their shit until a ‘boulder’ or ‘elephant turd’ forms and gets in the way of the excrement behind it, which somehow has to trickle through. It takes a lot of pills and even more careful attention before they’re grown-up and toilet-trained. It may take years before a person gets the hang of this basic life skill. And even then, when things get very scary, or very funny, the occasional adult will feel something warm between their legs that quickly turns cold.
Full chamber pots have to be emptied. Clean ones look nice, but usually it’s just a matter of moving the filth from one place to another.
Well shat and well forgotten. Every turd is heartlessly cast aside after its services have been rendered. Dumped. That’s what a bottom is for. Any respectable animal has a head at the end where it’s going and a bottom at the end where it’s been. When it shits, it automatically leaves its filth behind where it won’t trouble it anymore. It’s a good system—until too many of your species line up in front of you and leave their filth behind.
That’s called an environmental problem. For human beings it all began with the emergence of cities and villages. At one time we made sure we got away from our shit, but now we had to try to get our shit away from us. A little way outside the city or village was good enough for now. But what actually happens to a dumped turd? With luck, nature finishes it off in good time. But how? And what is good time? No one knew, because no one went to find out—until the 1960s, when the cow poo in Australia refused to decompose. Only then did it occur to anyone that even in the British motherland a cow pat would often lie there for six months at a time, much to the distress of the farmers. The fact is that a cow won’t eat where it has shat, and the grass underneath becomes scorched from the excess of manure.
Apparently there’s a big difference between tropical and temperate regions. In tropical regions, a lot of poo is carried away by dung beetles. During the rainy season they pop up out of the ground en masse to roll the dung into balls and carry it away. An elephant turd can disappear that way in a few hours. Dung beetles are attracted by the smell, as the Greek playwright Aristophanes already knew. In Peace, the hero Trygaeus goes to heaven on the back of a gigantic dung beetle in order to visit the gods. Fearing that the flight might be abruptly terminated, he asks his countrymen to make sure the beetle doesn’t smell any manure as long as he’s on board. He instructs his slaves to close off the privies and alleys with new masonry, and tells everyone to keep their arses shut.
Once a dung beetle has smelled its favourite odour, as Trygaeus knew, there’s no holding it back. More than 2250 years later it had lost none of its gusto, as we see from Souvenirs entomologiques by Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915):
What a lot of jostling for the same lump of manure. Never have fortune hunters, from every corner of the globe, applied themselves so diligently in the exploitation of a California gold mine. The pungent odour has spread the good news for miles around, and all have rushed in to claim part of the supply.
For a dung beetle, manure is its whole world, its everything, its present and its future. And its past: manure is its first memory as a larva in that underground paradise, surrounded by the fine shit so lovingly kneaded by its mother:
The coarse loaf mixed with sharp stalks of hay may be adequate for her own needs, but she sets higher standards for her family’s confectionery: it must be fine, exceptionally nutritious, and easily digestible. For this she needs sheep mortar, not the dark green olive-shaped kind that the wether scatters on the roads in rich abundance, but those that were fashioned to a soft cake by moister bowels.
Among the ancient Egyptians the dung beetle was sacred. They saw the beetle, pushing along a ball of manure, as a symbol of the sun in its orbit. But as Fabre already knew, there’s nothing sacred about the scarab. As soon as his ball is finished, a neighbour who has just begun his own work ‘abandons his labours to lend a helping hand to the fortunate owner’. It looks like an ideal collaborative effort, but it’s not. ‘It’s nothing but attempted robbery, pure and simple.’ ‘The sympathetic colleague, under the pretext of offering a helping hand, nurses his heinous plan of taking possession of the ball at the first opportunity.’ While the legal owner is busy digging his larder, the wicked companion quickly makes off with the ball, which he carries away with the speed of a pickpocket who’s afraid of getting caught red-handed. If the ball is meant for its own consumption, then what comes next is a gala of eating—and of shitting:
Twelve hours, or even more, is quite long for a session of gorging, but it makes for healthy and rapid digestion. While the material at the front end of the animal is continuously being ground up and swallowed, it re-emerges from the back, all in one piece, stripped of its nutritious components, and spun into a black thread, not unlike the waxed thread used by cobblers. The dung beetle defecates constantly during his meal, so fast is the operation of his alimentary canal. For as long as his dinner lasts, the thin thread emerges unbroken and coils itself neatly like an easily untangled ball of yarn, as long as it hasn’t begun to dry out. From time to time I pick up a piece of the thread with a pair of pincers and place it on a ruler divided into millimetres. The total of my measurements gives me the not inconsiderable figure of 2.88 m, produced in twelve hours.
In addition to the sacred variety there are 7000 other dung beetle species. Many are specialised in certain kinds of shit donation involving their favourite elements: one type prefers something juicy to suck on, the other goes for the harder bits, and a third loves to gnaw on dried crackers. In the desert, the dung beetles first soak rock-hard camel droppings in the damp earth, like biscuits in tea. Problems with manure processing once occurred in Australia, as mentioned earlier. There are no mammals there like the ones we have, only marsupials. Marsupials are fun to look at, and some of them are able to take enormous leaps, but this doesn’t help the farmers very much. You can’t milk them. So in 1788, humans brought cows to Australia. Besides milk, cows also produce cow pats. In the Netherlands these have been used as valuable fertiliser since time immemorial. But that didn’t work for the colonists in this land of misfortune. Their grass wouldn’t grow on cow manure. Left unused, the manure stayed where the cow had dropped it. So the little bit of grass that the rabbits had left alone was soon inundated. Given the fact that one cow could spoil 800 m2 of pasturage annually with its excrement, Australia began losing grasslands the size of the entire Netherlands in a single year. In addition, there were all sorts of horseflies and other carriers of disease living in the cow pats. What ought to have been a land of milk cows and honey bees deteriorated into a land of shit and dung flies.
At the heart of the problem was the fact that grass doesn’t live on manure but on the nutritive salts locked in it. The task of releasing these growth inducers falls to a great extent on the broad shoulders of dung beetles. But Australian dung beetles only like marsupial dung, which is nice and dry and fibrous. A floppy cow pat is not the sort of thing that makes their mouths water. This may testify to their good taste, but it left the Australians with a problem.
Just as the Dutch tackle their problems by setting up a new commission, so the people of Australia decided their problems had to be solved by importing a new species of animal. Two centuries after the arrival of the cow, dung beetles were brought in, this time from Africa. The beetles discharged their duties beyond all expectation. The cow manure was removed in no time. Yet that wasn’t the end of the problems. The pathogenic dung flies remained. In their determination not to make any mistakes this time, the Australians had made the mistake of subjecting the beetle to a rigorous quarantine before being imported. So not only were the unwelcome germs left in Africa, but so were the mites that live on dung beetles. And it was these very mites, which are transported by dung beetles from cow pat to cow pat, that control the spread of dung flies best by eating their eggs. The Australians’ next step, of course, was to import cow dung beetle mites. Don’t ever get the idea that they’re crazy down under.
There are more flies than beetles on a Dutch cow pat. Dung flies really love shit. Shit is their very meat and drink, their be-all and end-all. But not all shit is equally delicious. Just like the beetles, each species of fly has its favourite recipe. One goes for soft mush, the other thick gruel, and a third wouldn’t mind the addition of something to gnaw on. Fans of pea soup or beef stew certainly must recognise this preference for a very specific consistency. Cow shit can often satisfy everyone’s desire within just one pat, depending on the place and time. A cow pat gets juicier the further inside you go, and it gets drier the longer it lasts. That attracts a whole succession of species. The first to arrive are the horn flies (Haematobia irritans). They wait impatiently on the flanks of their benefactor until it gets the urge. Even before anything has made its appearance they assume their positions on the thighs, ready to plunge right into the virginal mush. According to expert G. A. Parker, studying mating flies on a cow pat may seem like a rather advanced form of perversion, but it is fascinating to see how within a minute the females have laid their eggs and are ready with dozens more, like football supporters in section C waiting for the next goal to be scored. Now the muck, no longer fresh, is attracting the other thirty-eight species of dung flies, one after another. At a distance they can tell from the smell if the correct degree of ripeness has been attained. Just like camembert. The males decide which pats are best for enticing the good females. If the cow pats get too dry, making it difficult for the females to penetrate the crust and lay their eggs, then only a few males will remain behind and the main force will continue on its way, to the next Promised Land. So new cow pats are always needed before the old ones are used up. But we can leave that to our livestock.
The fly larvae are no more able to polish off a Dutch cow pat than the dung beetle larvae or the earthworms, who are no slouches either. The greater part of a cow pat is broken down by bacteria and fungi, assisted by weather and wind, or trampled underfoot by cattle and pecked at by birds in search of larvae. In one gram of manure there are more than a million yeast cells and at least a hundred times as many bacteria. Compelled by the temperate climate to take their time eating, they spend an average of six months working on one cow pat. That’s a life-saver for the parasites that exit the cow along with the shit. Because cows avoid places where they’ve already shat, it can take a long time before their parasites happen upon a new host. To increase their chances, the larvae of the nematode Dictyocaulus viviparus climb onto the sporangia of the Pilobolus crystallinus fungus. When the spores inside are ripe, the larvae take a free ride with the sporangia, which are shot into the air. Dicrocoelium, a sheep parasite, works its way into the body of a passing ant. This causes the ant to become confused, and it climbs onto a blade of grass. When it bites into the grass, its jaws clamp down, whether the ant wants them to or not, and it just hangs there, giving the parasite plenty of time to climb on board a passing sheep.
In the nineteenth century it became clearer than ever that cities could no longer leave their rubbish removal to hanging ants, sacred beetles and randy flies. London, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam stank to high heaven. One cholera epidemic after another broke out, leaving many thousands dead each time. According to the then commonly held miasma theory, illnesses were caused by vapours, mist and evil-smelling gases. Koch and Pasteur would set us straight. But even before their time, in 1849, it was known that cholera had something to do with water polluted by excrement. Dr John Snow had carefully mapped this out for London. Vapours, dirty water or germs: when it came to fighting the disease, it didn’t much matter how it was explained. The shit had to go. And more hygiene had to be introduced. Hygiene was not a new virtue; it was an old emergency measure necessitated by overpopulation.
How do you get rid of shit? Many people had cesspools. When mixed with household rubbish and ashes from the hearth, human waste proved useful as fertiliser. For centuries you could even earn good money with it. But emptying the cesspools was not a pleasant job. Often the brickwork was too loosely constructed, and deliberately. The thinnest stuff would seep out and run into the soil, so you wouldn’t have to empty the cesspool so often. Anyway, it’s hard to dig a cesspool when you’re three storeys up. A more convenient solution in the inner cities was the bucket system. You shat in a bucket, and when that was full it was picked up and replaced by an empty one. In Frisian cities such as Leeuwarden and IJlst this system was still in use in 1970. Apparently it was still cost-effective in such agrarian districts. But that didn’t make the stench or the nuisance any more tolerable.
Overpopulated cities were an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, which gave rise to solutions as well as problems. A century before Leeuwarden got rid of its poo buckets, the Dutchman Charles Liernur came up with a brilliant idea. Using the most modern steam engines and pneumatic pumps, he could pump the faeces and urine out of a private toilet and into a system of cast iron pipes. The muck would be taken to underground collections points, from which it would be driven out of the city. Hendrik, prince of the Netherlands and governor of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, was immediately enthusiastic. It was partly thanks to him that the Liernur System was adopted in Amsterdam and Leiden in 1870. A program of furious digging began to lay the pipes and excavate the pits. All the citizenry had to do was shit.
Changing the shit barrels in Haarlem.
Then a traction engine with a steam-powered pneumatic pump drives to the small underground street reservoir to pump out the air from both the reservoir and the whole system of main and subsidiary pipes, up to the hermetically sealed house valves. These are then opened and shut one by one so the contents of the toilets, gasses and all, can be discharged into the street reservoir. Once the vacuum is complete, or almost complete, a column of air sweeps in when each house valve is opened that has a mechanical force roughly equal to that of thirty hurricanes.
You didn’t have to flush. The special Liernur Toilet Bowl was fashioned at such a steep angle that the shit never even came in contact with the back. Any filth that landed on the front would be automatically rinsed away during urination. Urine also kept the pipes clean free of charge; the ‘greasy components in the faeces’ would protect them from rusting. In actual practice, however, the system was rather disappointing. Cast iron, rubber and steam were unable to cope with faeces and urine. Not only did the system require a lot of maintenance, but pumping out the cesspools every day and carrying off the waste was also very labour-intensive. In 1912 Amsterdam was the last of three cities to give it up.
Like the Arsehole of Rome, the Cloaca Maxima emptied into the Tiber.
There was nothing wrong with Liernur’s concept. He was just too far ahead of his time; the technology wasn’t ripe. Today’s sewers also use a great deal of air pressure, not to pump out but to press. Back in the day, Liernur and his air had to give way to water. In spite of the Industrial Revolution, people all over the world opted for a concept from antiquity: the flush system. The great pride of this system was the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Sewer of Rome, to which even public toilets were connected. Starting in the sixth century BC, the Romans simply covered over the rivers and streams that were already being used to carry away waste, and they expanded the system with underground brick canals. At about the beginning of the current era, the Greek traveller Strabo described the Roman sewer as ‘large enough here and there to allow a wagon full of hay to pass through it; while the inflow of water via the aqueducts was so abundant that it looked as if entire rivers were streaming through the city and the sewers’. The sewer builders must have looked to the Greek myth of Heracles for inspiration. Heracles had been ordered to muck out the stables of King Augias. He was given one day to clean up thirty years’ worth of shit from three thousand cows. To do this, he made two holes in the stable walls and let two rivers run in, the Alpheus and the Peneus. But when Heracles went to collect his wages the king refused to pay him because the actual work had not been done by Heracles but by the rivers.
The Romans decided to let the Tiber do the dirty work. Two thousand years later, London handed the job over to the Thames, Paris to the Seine, and Amsterdam to the Amstel and the IJ. Each time the same solution was used to tackle the same problem. But geography wasn’t always cooperative by any means. London is too far from the sea for drainage to be effective, and the waste was regularly washed back in on the following tide. Paris had more luck with its Seine. And when the crowded centre of Paris was being opened up to accommodate the construction of the sewers, George Haussmann took advantage of the situation to give the city a new face. He himself was delighted by Paris’s new backside:
Like organs of the great city, the sewers will work just like those of the human body, without ever seeing the light of day. The pure and fresh water, the light and the warmth will flow through them like the various liquids that benefit life with their active support. The fluids will do their mysterious work without ever disturbing the good operation of the city or harming its outer beauty.
In Holland the geography was downright hostile. In the absence of differences in elevation, the drainage water stagnated in the ditches and canals. The Dutch canals were dug partly as defensive structures and usually in concentric circles, as in the case of Amsterdam, which did not contribute to effective drainage. Amsterdam’s main canals could be drained a bit with the help of the tides on the Zuiderzee and an ingenious system of sluices, but in the Jordaan district during the nineteenth century the stench was unbearable. There all the privies emptied into the canals, which were more or less stagnant. Tourists had to hold their nose. ‘If there’s one thing the Dutch really need to clean,’ wrote the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt after a visit in 1861, ‘it’s their water.’ Amsterdammers who could afford it traditionally fled to country houses along the Vecht or the Amstel Rivers during the summer, when the stench was at its most extreme. When they returned in the autumn from Diemen or Ouderkerk south of Amsterdam the stench was there to welcome them. But the Department of Public Works, which had been set up in 1850, was already working on a solution. Canals were filled in and replaced by sewers. Yet it would be more than a century before all drainage into the remaining canals was halted. In my youth in Amsterdam, while skating on the Herengracht or the Keizersgracht in the winter, I would see warm steaming turds floating in their own little holes in the ice along the quay where the rich people had done their dumping. Today those turds go through sewer pipes—most of which run along the same canal but under water, tidily hidden from view. This is not to say that you don’t see turds anymore in the city. Amsterdammers have dogs, too.