girl in greenwood

I had this thought before I fell asleep last night after working the PM shift at The Home... human civilization revolves around poop. Now, I admit I started thinking about this for selfish reasons. When I worked a couple of days ago, I had a giant Code Brown to deal with first thing in the morning, and the resident who created it continued to create more Code Browns throughout the next few days. (Poor dear, she's embarrassed and upset about it, too.) Then, at home, we've got these two elderly cats. Ms. Siamese Kitty is quite constipated and so I'm giving her Laxatone every day to help her go. And Mr. Black Cat is on prednisone because he has inflammatory bowel disease, so whenever his system gets unbalanced, I have to use baby wipes on his butt. Which he does NOT appreciate, no matter how much I tell him that senior citizens sometimes need assistance with their activities of daily living, such as toileting and bathing.

Then I had a weird conversation with my friend A* the other day, where she was telling me about a guy she knows who had gone to visit an old friend and her French boyfriend at their home... only to discover that the couple was in the process of handling their own sewage treatment. They were trying to reclaim their "grey water" to do... I'm not sure what. Water their garden? Anyway, the upshot was, they didn't flush their toilets. Which is just gross, no matter how environmentally correct you are. If you want a non-flushing toilet, you should go ahead and install a composting toilet! Or an outhouse!

That got me to thinking... modern sewage treatment isn't just about the convenience or the stink prevention - it's really about hygiene and public health. In the biography of Florence Nightingale that I read recently (review coming soon), one of the things that she noticed in the military hospitals in the Crimean War was that the men got sicker when their drinking water was not kept clean. Although she didn't know that cholera was spread by the ingestion of water contaminated with infected feces, she instinctively understood that dirty drinking water is unhealthy. This is still a problem today in less-developed parts of the world... which leads me back to the point that human civilization really does revolve around poop.