To most people, a bathroom is a purely practical thing. You go, you do your business, and you leave. It is not a place to be celebrated. But archaeologists aren’t most people. To them, discovering an old toilet buried in the earth is a window into the day-to-day life of a person who’s been dead for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Sure, that does mean digging through old poop, but the things that can be learned are so worth it.
Case in point, a study was recently published in Parasitology about a new discovery found in a 500-year-old latrine in Bruges, Belgium. Within that latrine, located inside what served as a meeting house and administrative seat for the Spanish merchant community in the city, the researchers found an egg belonging to Schistosoma mansoni, a parasitic flatworm.
S. mansoni is not typically the sort of houseguest one wants in their bathroom. In fact, as the parasite responsible for causing schistosomiasis, a disease that infects 200 million people worldwide and is the second-most deadly parasitic disease — only topped by malaria — it’s kind of the exact opposite of a welcome visitor. Particularly if you’re a Spanish merchant living several hundred years before the advent of a cure for the disease infecting your gut.
For the researchers, though, finding the egg in Belgium helped solve a mystery involving S. mansoni while also demonstrating the connectedness of the world, even in an age before planes, trains, and automobiles.
Today, S. mansoni is endemic throughout the tropics, but it is not native to much of its current range. A thousand years ago, the worm only lived in Africa. Somehow, it managed to find its way across an ocean to South America, and the discovery of the egg in the droppings of a Spanish trader demonstrates how. The Spanish merchants of Bruges were instrumental in the import of commodities from Africa such as gold and ivory, as well as the slave trade. And if this one hapless Spaniard could carry S. mansoni to Belgium, others like him could certainly carry it to all corners of the world.
Not only do the study findings demonstrate the complexity and interconnectedness of urban life, even in medieval times, Maxime Poulain, an archaeologist at Ghent University, said in a press release, it shows how Bruges, an international trade and cultural hub, “inevitably also facilitated the spread of diseases through its strong maritime trade networks.”
Hopefully, as our unfortunate merchant sat upon the toilet in Bruges so many years ago, the foresight that his plight would provide a group of scientists with a fascinating insight into city life and the movement of a nasty tropical disease was enough to provide comfort as the flatworm ransacked his body. Totally worth the debilitating disease.
