The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage (review)

While there are tens of thousands of books and articles about the rise of railroads in Britain and North America, a much smaller literature exists about the history of toilets and sewage. Whether this absence of attention is the product of some deep and longstanding collective psychoanalytic conflict need not detain us, for the truth is that very few scholars have had the inclination or courage to tackle the question of how urban areas relieved themselves of vast quantities of human excreta. If the topic does not seem as glamorous as the iron horse, it is nevertheless a subject that occupied a vast amount of attention in the nineteenth century as large urban agglomerations took root in the United States, Canada, and Britain.

In this wide-ranging study, Jamie Benidickson explores the social, legal, and cultural history of flushing human excrement into bodies of water. He argues that the culture of flushing did not arise by accident but was in fact the result of self-conscious policies in both Europe and North America. As Benidickson puts it, ‘Water became a “sink” by design.’ There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about the use of rivers, streams, and lakes for flushing away bodily waste. Rather, the conjunction of various historical forces – the rise of expansive water supply systems, nineteenth-century understandings of disease and public health, new legal doctrines that sanctioned the discharge of waste – explains how flushing human waste rose to dominance, indeed has become so deeply ingrained and taken for granted that most people scarcely give pulling the toilet handle a second thought.

In one of the most compelling sections of the book, Benidickson examines those who objected to the idea of discharging waste into waterways. These people advocated for the conservation of so-called night soil; they placed their faith in the men who came in the middle of the night to empty privies and carried off the waste to rural hinterlands where it was returned to the soil, thereby renewing the fertility of the land. Night soil’s journey paralleled the more significant trade in horse manure. Many nineteenth-century cities carted and barged manure from stables to farms to help boost the nutrient content of the surrounding soil so it could grow more hay, which was then shipped in the reverse direction to cities so that horses – the nineteenth century’s most important urban animal – could be fed. To these advocates of waste recycling, the idea of flushing excrement into water was wrong because it wasted valuable nutrients, not to mention the economic opportunity that came with recycling them back onto the land. ‘“What is a nuisance in London,”’ one English barrister explained, ‘“is a source of revenue in Brussels.”’ The argument of the recyclers was a forceful one, made all the more so when those who objected to flushing away human excrement pointed to the growing guano trade, bird droppings mined and shipped from Peru to help support the fertility of farms in Britain and North America, a trade that first began in the 1850s. Why go through all the trouble of importing soil nutrients when one could harvest nutrients from human and animal excrement close to home, they asked.

The legacy of all the flushing is almost unfathomable. While the flushing regime has caused the complete loss of some rivers, Benidickson notes that the full consequences of this taken-for-granted activity not only await assessment, but are growing by the day as reports emerge of the discovery of antibiotics, antidepressants, and even sunscreens in water supplies. Nor are the stunning consequences of such a mundane daily activity likely to improve if people continue to distance themselves from their bodily wastes and their ecological consequences through automated toilet-flushing mechanisms and self-closing seats. It is time that the members of the industrialized world thought more about what happens in their bathrooms and its wider implications for the world. Benidickson’s book is a...