To celebrate World Toilet Day we thought it would be
appropriate to quickly highlight one of our archival manuscripts on sanitary
care in the tropics. Written by Dr James Balfour-Kirk to his godson who was
travelling through the tropics with his family in 1925, Kirk provides a candid
point by point guide to surviving in the tropics including chapters on personal
hygiene, keeping cool, rest and disease and the disposal of excreta. It is the
latter that it seems appropriate to dwell on with Balfour-Kirk describing the ‘Filth
Diseases’ such as ‘Cholera, the dysenteries and typhoid fever, [as] preventable
diseases, yet they are the cause of enormous loss of life in the tropics’. He elaborates by adopting a military analogy to describe the course of typhoid: how it
lurks in silence in the tissues before composing itself for a final assault
leading to a ‘Battle Royal’ that leaves the victim physically prostrate and
persists for several weeks followed by a long period of convalescence, or the 'post-war reconstruction period', which Balfour-Kirk describes as a “bloody waste of time”.
He apologetically explains that filth diseases can only be
contracted by eating and drinking “infected excrement within a comparatively
short time after it has been voided by a patient or a carrier of the disease”. He
admonishes himself for the “brutally crude” way of expressing himself before
outlying the universal soil pollution that persists in the tropics where human
excrement is used for fertilizer and water supplies are easily contaminated and
everything is exacerbated by domestic flies (they have their own chapter).
The only solution is to boil all water to be used and cook
all your food thoroughly. He adds finally that you shouldn't forget to boil
your ‘tooth water’ e.g. water for brushing your teeth. Make sure the house boy
is not the "lazy type" and provides clean water by testing him, by adding a few drops of eau-de-Cologne in
the toilet water jug in the morning and seeing if it smells of cologne in the
evening. If it doesn't, Balfour-Kerr suggests you may “have up” the “house-boy
as the occasion and the custom of the country permits’.
Whilst, the manuscript is very much a product of the
colonial era, the persistence of water-borne infections and the importance of
functioning latrines is still as relevant today as it was then.
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