Historicizing the modern European excremental world-view

This conceptual historical paper outlines how excretion came to be seen as the lowest form of matter in the European history of hygiene, health, urban planning and in psychoanalytic theory. It traces the common symbolic imagery associated with excretory substances, processes and technologies, scatological humor and anal erotism in the history of ideas across the period 1850-1930. It examines the history of ideas about excretion as a symbol of money, class-distinction and social progress in late nineteenthcentury psychoanalytic, ethnographic, urban-planning and popular press sources, in the history of sewers, constipation and scatological humor by tracing their common symbolic imagery in the history of European ideas. It reveals the way French texts in this period associated excretion with money, progress, class, race and colonial difference, comparing these ideas to Germanic and British examples. In so doing, it contextualizes prevailing social attitudes of disgust that continue to inhibit the application of successful treatments for the medical condition of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.