Page 186 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

people’s houses warning others not to enter, the population in the majority of cases failed to put them

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up. Even when people discovered that they had diarrhea, Przesmycki lamented, they did not isolate

themselves but instead carried on with their usual business—going to work and taking part in social

events—and thus spread the disease to those around them. Infected children were not put on the

toilet, but were instead allowed to relieve themselves wherever they were, with their diapers or pieces

of linen removed from time to time to be washed either in vessels filled with water or in the local

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pond. In fact, representatives of the Polish state frequently complained that peasants followed
sanitary rules only if they thought that doing so would directly benefit their economic interests and

were little swayed by arguments about the good of their village as a whole.

Assumptions about the motivations of local people were conveyed in discussions of toilets.

Already in February 1931, the head of the Volhynian health department reported that the population

in one village had increased the number of toilets only in order to impress the sanitary commission

and did not accustom itself to the use of these facilities, leaving their backyards full of feces. The

only answer to the problem, he argued, lay in convincing rural populations that using the toilet had

economic benefits that they would themselves see—for instance, pigs protected from human feces

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would have a lower risk of disease and therefore a higher market value. Despite such proposals,

however, a scathing report on local health conditions in the mid-1930s indicated that a significant

part of the rural population of Volhynia still didn’t see the need to have a building dedicated to the

disposal of their excrement. The traces of “human existence in the worst form” could be found

everywhere—around the house, the stable, farm buildings, and gardens, the report’s author stated,

and the limited number of toilets that did exist in the countryside usually lacked a roof or a door and

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featured little more than straw walls and a plank over a small hole. An interwar memoirist from

79 Dr. F. Przesmycki, “Uwagi o obecnej epidemji czerwonki na Wołyniu,” Zdrowie 49, no. 9 (1934): 843.
80 Ibid., 843.
81 Letter from Dr. W. Habich, the head of the health department (February 16, 1931), DARO 30/7/103/1.
82 Dr. L. Nerlich, “Drogi uzdrowotnienia wsi wołyńskiej,” Zdrowie (May 1936): 476.

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