"Receptacles of filth" : ǂb a sensory history of early American bedpans, 1750 to 1830

Date
2025
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Bedpans made and used in the early United States appear in historic house museums and other cultural heritage institutions throughout the country. More often than not, however, these objects are hidden in plain sight. Informed by object-centered approaches to material culture studies as well as disability history and sensory studies scholarship, this thesis asks what these oft-ignored “receptacles of filth” might reveal about the early American sick-chamber and the twentieth-century house museum. Specifically, it examines histories of medicine, caregiving labor, and illness or infirmity in the home. This thesis begins with a case study of a late eighteenth-century pewter bedpan on display at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, which took on new meaning as a relic of the early American past in the midst of the twentieth-century Colonial Revival. While its seemingly pristine pewter surface might dazzle the eye, the history of the bedpan is also that of the nose, the hands, the digestive organs, and (of course) the rear end. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century receipt books, housekeeping manuals, medical journals, and satirical cartoons that make reference to bedpans or chamber pots attest to the ongoing battle doctors, nurses, domestic servants, and other caregivers waged against “dirt” in the sick-chamber. Dirty substances such as urine and excrement were more than just what anthropologist Mary Douglas has called “matter out of place.” The sight, smell, and feel of these substances were a source of great anxiety in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American subjects. Finally, this thesis considers the bedpan as commercial good, examining both highly decorative bedpans used in early America as well as the wide array of antique bedpans available for purchase in secondhand stores and e-sellers such as Etsy and e-Bay. Such objects attest to bedpans as a source not just of revulsion but, in certain cases, of aesthetic pleasure. While bedpans may be out of sight and out of mind for most twenty-first century Americans, these objects remain not just literal receptacles of filth but symbolic receptacles of meaning. The study of bedpans is the study of the complex relationships between people, their bodies, and their waste.
Description
Keywords
Disability history, Early America, Material culture studies, Sensory history, Bedpans
Citation