Bodily elimination was routinely public in preindustrial cities, unlike today

Evidence

Nevertheless, going to the bathroom in the preindustrial city was not the almost exclusively private affair that it is today. A good deal of this activity probably took place on the street in full view of anyone who happened to be about. If, as Chastenet tells us, the seventeeth and eighteenth century Parisian gentleman considered it perfectly acceptable to conduct an “audience” while seated on his chaise percee (1952:231), there is no reason to suppose that our urban ancestors were inhibited by any “false modesty.” Given the fact, as we shall see, that city streets were frequently the dumping grounds for human wastes, a little direct contribution to such “piles” would not appear unreasonable. Some cities, with perhaps more fastidious elites, were equipped with public latrines. While these at least moved some of the elimination activity indoors, they were hardly citadels of privacy. In Rome, for example, the seats of the latrine were not separated from one another with any sort of partitions. Carcopino suggests that in the Roman forica, “people met … , conversed, and exchanged invitations to dinner without embarrassment” (1940:41). — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 178

Categorization

• CANDY: Roman public latrines where people socialized and exchanged dinner invitations is a perfectly tweetable unlikely-historical-fact.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s interest in urban anonymity: the very practices that now define privacy boundary were once civic sociability,