“GRAND and unapproachable discovery!” declared the pages of Scientific American.
It was the 1850s – an age of invention that saw the birth of the modern sewing machine, the safety elevator and the machine gun. Readers squinting at the small print below the eye-catching headline may have been perplexed to find an advert for Joseph C. Gayetty’s Medicated Paper, America’s first commercial toilet paper – the “greatest blessing of the age”, he trumpeted.
Gayetty’s announcement proved to be surprisingly provocative. Whereas loo roll may now be considered an essential home comfort, in the 1850s the idea of forking out good money for mere “bum fodder” was greeted by a chorus of mocking laughter from scientists. Medics were particularly concerned by Gayetty’s assertion that his new paper could cure piles, and soon took to the pages of leading medical journals to lampoon the loo-roll pioneer.
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Despite his grandiose claims, Gayetty was not the first to “discover” toilet paper. As with the compass, the wheelbarrow, silk and gunpowder, the Chinese had got there hundreds of years earlier. Paper had been circulating in China since the 2nd century and it didn’t take long for people to apply it to their behinds. Even the Emperor Hongwu, a brutal despot ruling in the 14th century, showed his more sensitive side by ordering 15,000 sheets of extra-soft, perfumed toilet paper for his imperial household.
But the innovation did not spread to the west. The yeomen of Britain were content with fistfuls of sheep’s wool or leaves (leading to an excellent medieval joke: Q. What is the cleanest leaf? A. The holly, for no one will wipe his arse on it). Aristocrats would deploy scraps of linen or cloth. Or rather, they’d have someone deploy them on their behalf – a servant’s manual from the 14th century advises the “groom of the stool” to be ready with an “arse-wispe” at the critical moment.
With the advance of the printing press, people soon turned to the disused pages of pamphlets and books. As the 17th century author Thomas Browne wrote: “He that writes abundance of books, and gets abundance of children, may in some sense be said to be a benefactor to the public, because he furnishes it with bumfodder and soldiers.”
All this was to change in the 19th century. Gayetty was not alone in his attempt to commercialise toilet paper. British firm GW Atkins & Co, who were UK market leaders in the 1890s, claimed to have held a royal warrant since 1817. This, however, may have just been marketing bumf.
In any case, it was Gayetty’s Medicated Paper that caused the biggest storm, almost as soon as it joined such products as Upham’s Hair Gloss and Kellinger’s Liniment on the groaning shelves of US drugstores. The sheets, Gayetty declared, were “delicate as a bank-note and as stout as foolscap”. But what really riled the medical establishment was his boast that it could “cure and prevent piles”. Printer’s ink is not, in fact, a “rank poison”, as he claimed, and does not cause haemorrhoids – but that didn’t stop many companies from pushing loo roll as a remedy until the 1930s.
“What really riled the medical establishment was the boast that it could cure and prevent piles”
With their breeches down
Medical journals were soon awash with anti-Gayetty satire. “Homoeopathy, hydropathy, et id homne genus [sic] must now hide their diminished heads,” sneered the New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette. “Mr Gayetty of New York City has found that the public mind is prepared for anything whatever in the shape of humbuggery, and he at once, with true Yankee readiness, administers to their rapacious appetites in a manner to be admired, if humbuggery is ever admirable.”
In a more ribald vein, the Medical and Surgical Reporter wrote that “empiricism has changed tactics. Its usual bold effrontery is turned to attack the public in the rear. Mr Gayetty of New York intends to take advantage of them by catching them with their breeches down.”
It wasn’t long before The Lancet caught the whiff of good sport to be had. “[It] might be of use to the surgeons who take the rectal region under their care to know that the prognosis, pathology and therapeutics of [piles] are simplified in an uncommon degree, and that their occupation is now gone to the wall,” the writer sniffed. “All that is required is a simple piece of paper with the name ‘Gayetty’ stamped on it.”
Of course, Gayetty’s product was no mere flash in the pan. Even if it didn’t really cure piles, the public must have appreciated the comfort of dedicated toilet tissue, and it soon spawned a host of copycat products. However, consumer expectation does not seem to have been high. Northern Tissue’s declaration that its paper was “splinter free!” in the 1930s gives a startling indication of how eye-watering some early offerings must have been. Today, the toilet paper industry is worth $3.5 billion annually in the US alone, with the average individual using more than 20,000 sheets a year.
But could we now be entering the twilight of the Gayetty era? Just as the Chinese revolutionised bum-cleansing with their high-tech wipes, their neighbours across the East China Sea in Kokura, Japan, have applied third-millennium science to bringing the practice up to date with the Washlet.
Launched in 1980 by Toto after years of research in bottom-centric ergonomics, the Washlet delivered a triple-whammy of toilet comforts: its heated seat keeps your buttocks cosy, a jet of warm water hoses you down and a gust of air dries you off. By 2009, 72 per cent of Japanese households were equipped with a Washlet or equivalent device.
So Gayetty’s “discovery” may one day become as obsolete as the steam whistles, gage cocks and Ohio mowers that also featured on Scientific American‘s classified ads page that week. On the other hand, “quack remedies” can be surprisingly resilient, as pointed out by this review of a new journal in 1869. “The price of The Homoeopathic Quarterly is $1 per annum,” the author notes. “Neither so cheap nor so serviceable as Gayetty’s Medicated Paper.”
