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To browse my collection of books please click on the ‘Home’ link above.
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My book is available to buy from Amazon. Please click here
This book contains over two hundred pages and over one hundred illustrations.
It costs only £7.50 and I will be donating all my royalties in 2020 to West Dorset Home Start which is a local Dorset charity supporting families with young children - please click here to learn more.
Why not buy a second copy as a gift for a friend or relative and save £2.99 on P&P?*
This is an easy-to-read account of humanity’s five millennia intimate relationship with its bodily waste.
Please scroll down to read more about my book.
* P&P charges do not apply to Amazon Prime members.
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Reader Review
“This delightful book is written, not only to bring a smile to the reader’s face in these times of difficulty, but has enough scientific data for those engaged into research about social history through the ages. The book is beautifully illustrated, comprehensively indexed and has 172 references! This reveals the efforts the author has taken to keep the reader interested. These days, we take for granted that there are bodily functions occurring daily be it in royal palaces, upmarket hotels, primitive “dunnies” in the Australian Bush or shanty towns in South Africa. The excrement from these activities must be dealt with somehow. The author tackles these problems with humour and expertise.”
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An Earth Closet used by the author.
Recycling at its simplest!
The Bristol Infirmary Poo Identification Chart.
This 18th century man is having problems “Pointing Percy At The Porcelain!”
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Pooing and peeing is now something that we prefer to do in private and not to give much thought to unless we are constipated or restricted to close proximity to a toilet due to over enthusiasm in the Indian restaurant the previous evening when drunkenly ordering “The hottest dish on the menu!”
Once you have flushed the toilet and casually watched the poo, pee and paper slip around the bend you probably don’t worry what it is made up of or where it goes next.
This book will explain that your gut may contain as many as 100 trillion bacteria belonging to over one thousand species. Your gut ecosystem is as complicated and vulnerable as any rain forest. Some intestinal illnesses can be cured by transferring poo from a one person’s gut to another’s unhealthy gut.
Skara Brae is a large Neolithic settlement on the Bay of Skaill on the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. It was occupied roughly 5,000 years ago. The dwellings contain some of the earliest examples of indoor toilets.
The Babylonian, Minoan and Roman civilisations all had relatively sophisticated toilet systems - many communal. Where better to sit and put the world to rights?
Mediaeval castles had their ‘Garderobe’ toilets which stank so badly that best clothes were hung up in the stench because the moths would not live there.
The first mechanically flushed inside toilet was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harington, who was Queen Elizabeth’s godson, and he installed it in his mansion and in his Godmother’s residence - the first “Royal Flush” so to speak?
And yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century indoor toilets were still a rarity owned by the rich. Raw sewerage oozing up between the floorboards in slum bedrooms in Dorset was the cause of a deadly cholera epidemic as witnessed by the Rev. Moule in Fordington as he visiting his dying parishioners. He saved countless lives by inventing a cheap and effective ‘Dry Earth Closet’ to collect and store their human waste safely.
Public toilets are now being liberated from the ‘Gender Binary’ so that the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ users are being catered for with new designs of asexual porcelain urinals and pedestals.
This fully illustrated book will take the reader on a five thousand year exploration of toilet and sewerage history right up to the ‘zero gravity’ toilet facilities on spacecraft, the liberating funnel devices that enable women to pee standing up, Japanese toilets which are fully automated and are Bluetooth controlled - and very much more!
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Nineteenth century “Night Soil Men” collecting Londoners’ human waste.
Have plumbers changed their ways after two centuries?
A 1,000 year old Viking turd recovered in 1972 near York. It measures an eye-watering eight inches long by two inches wide.
A Georgian lady demonstrates her chamber pot skill.
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Can you answer these questions?
(Answers to these and many more questions are in my book)
Why would an 18th century canal boat owner in the Midlands be angry to be asked “Are you taking the piss?”
How many trees are chopped down each year worldwide to be made into toilet paper?
Why did Victorian gangs break into churches and steal the floorboards in the pews?
What’s the connection between bidets and trotting ponies?
How many tonnes of toxic untreated sewerage are still being pumped into the River Thames?
Why does asparagus make some people’s pee smell bad but not others?
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