Imagine that to do your physiological needs, half of your family could not use the toilet and had to settle for doing them in any corner near home. Well, this is just what happens to half humanity. In the XXI century, there are 3.6 billion people who do not have a proper toilet.
The lack of such a basic service has dire consequences, because the stools accumulate and end up contaminating drinking water, rivers, seas, farmland … and, furthermore, human remains become a focus of infections and diseases that can be deadly. It is for this reason that United Nations chose November 19 as World Toilet Day. According to this international organization, for every dollar invested in sanitation, five are saved in medical assistance. In fact, the oldest generations of our country remember perfectly what it means to grow up without a toilet at home. Both the people who lived in the barracks areas of the suburban areas and those who lived in the peasant houses, where there was only one commune or, in the worst case, they had to go to the barn to relieve themselves. with the animals. It was quite similar to what had been in older times. For instance, in Roman times, in the buildings of the public toilets there was a space for that purpose. It was a large room with benches with holes where they defecated in groups, without any privacy. In Pompeii it is still preserved and, when you visit, it is inevitable not to imagine the constant concert of winds or the nauseating bad smell that must have come out of those four walls.
During the Middle Ages, issues related to the body were more limited to the sphere of intimacy because Christianity made a moral reading of everything related to the body. In other words, people expelled their things at home and that is why they ended up designing furniture for that purpose. On Handel’s house-museum in London, in the bedroom, next to the bed, there is the one used by that famous composer. In some cases these utensils were hidden inside a cabinet called “water closet”. Hence, even now, the universal abbreviation for services is WC.
The great transformation came between the 19th and 20th centuries, when they were perfected sewage systems and the authorities began to worry about the treatment of waste from urban areas. And especially because it was introduced running water. Obviously the first beneficiaries were the members of the higher classes, who had enough money to pay and maintain this type of facilities. In this sense, the case of Queen Victoria of England. In 1860 a private toilet was installed in his rooms in the German castle of Ehrenburg, where he used to spend the summer months. No one but her could use that toilet.
Despite the fact that technological innovation was deployed at the end of the 19th century, the truth is that humanity had been wondering how to achieve it for a long time. The first to seriously study it was an inventor born in the 12th century named Ismail Al-Jazari. This man, who lived in an area of Mesopotamia that currently corresponds to Turkey, wrote ‘The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices’, where he presented a hundred creations in which water often played a prominent role in moving utensils. One of them was a system to provide clean water during ablutions that Muslims must follow for their religious rituals. Usually people shared the same water but this inventor, despite not having current knowledge of biology, already sensed that this could be a source of disease transmission. To avoid this, he designed a system of conduits connected to a cistern that was filled and emptied every time someone used the water, just as the current cisterns that we have in first world houses do now. And it is that although surprising, history also has its role in the toilet.
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Museum
Aware of its importance, in India since 1970 there is the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets. In its facilities, a journey through 4500 years of history is made to explain how humanity has done it to get rid of its faeces and make the citizens of their country aware of the need to have adequate toilets.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com