What Is a Chamber Pot?

Background

• These vessels earned their name simply because they are pots or receptacles that you keep in your bedchamber. The earliest versions of this portable potty for grown-ups and children were initially metal, such as copper or pewter, and later earthenware or stoneware. Both were basically shaped like a cooking pot. Over the centuries it evolved into a large, round bowl with an outward curving rim and a handle, and was kept under the bed or in a small nearby cupboard. The pot would be cold and painful to sit on, particularly in the middle of winter in a bedroom without central heating, so small wooden seats with lids were developed for them, rather like a modern commode.

History

• Portable voiding receptacles of various shapes and sizes have been in use for over three thousand years, and the earliest discovered dates from Ancient Egypt. The Romans developed and introduced a flushing sewer system, but this didn't properly catch on throughout the United States, Britain or Europe until around the 19th century, when hygiene and sanitation were discovered to be crucial to public health and safety. Until then, chamber pots, holes in the ground, outhouses or privies and arbitrary methods of waste disposal, including emptying chamber pots out of a window into a street already reeking with sewage, featured prominently in daily life.

Design

• Archaeologists in Egypt have found discreet boat-shaped urinals for girls and women, and in medieval Europe, pots with a handle and a hole in the top were common. English potteries manufactured vast numbers of chamber pots in the 19th century for the domestic market and for export, and it's these chamber pots that are often found in American museums and antique collections. Usually plain in color but sometimes decorated with hand-painted or printed artwork, the designs often satirically reflected the burning political issues of the day -- chamber pots from 18th-century America sometimes featured images of King George III, for example.

21st-Century Sanitation

• Basic chamber pots are still in use in many areas of the world where drainage systems are not in existence. UNICEF reports that as of 1998, over half of the world's population did not have access to modern sanitation. Disease, rats and mosquitoes were and still are endemic in those areas where communities are forced to live without flushable sewage systems -- sometimes in plague-inducing quantities. Quaint though the chamber pot may be to collectors of ephemera of past centuries, its use and the proper disposal of its contents provided only rudimentary protection against unsanitary conditions.