The Humble History of the Bedpan

Over the past few centuries, inventors have tweaked the design of the receptacles here and there, but overall, not much has changed about the dependable medical supply

Leo DeLuca | Freelance writer

September 24, 2026 3:04 p.m.

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Eric Eakin has a three-bedroom house with more than 250 bathrooms. There’s a white one with a tiny Richard Nixon head inside it. Another is decorated in colorful earth tones and adorned with feathers. One resembles a ukulele, complete with a neck, headstock and three steel-wire strings.

In the basement of his family’s Bay Village, Ohio, home, more than 250 bedpans—containers used to collect urine or feces by those confined to a bed—are nestled together in stacks, piled on the floor and lined up on makeshift shelves fashioned from concrete blocks and slabs of wood. Eakin’s collection, believed to be the world’s largest, has appeared on MTV and in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

“I don’t think I pissed away my savings. My collection is worth a lot of money,” says Eakin. “You know why? … Because I got in at the bottom.”

Surprisingly, Eakin isn’t alone. On August 10, 1988, the Country Today, a newspaper based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, profiled Edith Martell, who displayed some 60 bedpans in an old henhouse on her property. Her favorite was painted with a chipmunk splashing beneath a waterfall. In nearby La Crosse, Wisconsin, Earl Lord, a retired electrician, once amassed more than 200 bedpans. Lord and Eakin even traded Christmas cards.

For Eakin, the collection began in the late 1960s, when his late mother, Elaine Harriet Weller Eakin, was gifted a bedpan as a going-away present from her prankster friends in Europe.

Elaine later acquired a smaller, junior-size bedpan made by the British health retailer Boots. She displayed the little one in her small bathroom and the big one in her larger bathroom. Both were filled with plastic flowers.

“She passed away, and I inherited two bedpans,” says Eakin, matter-of-factly. “And two is the start of any collection.”

Eakin knows exactly which bedpans started his collection. When the very first bedpan was used by humans, however, is impossible to say. But he has a theory.

“The first bedpan has to have been used when old Og tripped and broke his leg,” says Eakin, using “Og” as a stand-in for some clumsy prehistoric human. “When he was on the ground recovering, they must’ve slipped a slab of bark or a big leaf under his hind end. They say that’s the start of civilization—when people stayed behind to help someone rather than leave them for dead.”

The idea echoes a story attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead. When asked to identify the earliest sign of civilization, Mead supposedly pointed to a healed femur. A broken leg would have left a prehistoric person unable to hunt, gather or flee danger. A healed bone, then, suggested that someone had stayed behind to care for them. Very civilized, indeed.

Whether Mead told the story is unsubstantiated. But the idea has endured. Civilization is measured not only by what humans create, but by how they care for one another. And how they use their creations to care for one another, too.

“The space of illness has radically changed over the decades, over the centuries even, but physiology has not,” says Katherine Ott, curator in the division of science and medicine at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The basic need to evacuate what we eat and drink is still the same. And bedpans are still used and still disliked. They’re still awkward and invasive.”

And while we will never know whether the world’s first bedpan was a leaf, a piece of bark or something else entirely, its history is about much more than medical technology. It’s about love and hate, germs and illness, dignity and shame, and, inherently, urine and feces.

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While Eric Eakin may beg to differ, a bedpan is not usually a family heirloom.

“As very mundane, everyday objects, it’s not surprising that there aren’t very many examples of very old bedpans in museum collections,” says Harriet Jackson, associate curator of medicine at London’s Science Museum. “They aren’t the kind of objects that would have been treasured or passed down through the generations.”

Of the bedpans that have survived, the Science Museum appears to preserve what may be the world’s oldest: a green earthenware vessel dating to the 16th or 17th century.

“It was originally discovered by the Ministry of Works during building works opposite Westminster Abbey in 1951,” says Jackson. “The area around Westminster Abbey has long been a site of religious and political power and home to various hospitals and alms houses, dating back to the Tudor period. The bedpan could potentially date back to one of these institutions, but with the information we have available it’s difficult to say with any certainty.”

What we can say with certainty is that, as the decades passed, earthenware bedpans gave way to vessels made from materials such as brass, glass, porcelain and pewter.

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Of all the pewter bedpans in the world, perhaps the most famous belonged to George and Martha Washington.

Shortly after America’s first president died on December 14, 1799, at age 67, his family’s pewter pan was auctioned off. Martha Custis Peter, Washington’s step-granddaughter, was the lucky winner. The vessel passed down through her family and is now preserved at Mount Vernon. (Maybe bedpans are family heirlooms, after all.)

Once mislabeled a “plate warmer,” the Washingtons’ bedpan is a fun oddity. But one woman in particular—a willowy British nurse—had a far more serious relationship with the device.

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Florence Nightingale, often called the founder of modern nursing, references “utensils”—her term for bedpans—numerous times in her famous 1859 book, Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not.

Nightingale railed against using bedpans without lids, admonished nurses to clean them outside the sickroom and reprimanded her colleagues for leaving them unemptied.

“Of the fatal effects of the effluvia from the excreta, it would seem unnecessary to speak, were they not so constantly neglected,” she wrote. “Concealing the utensils behind the valance to the bed seems all the precaution which is thought necessary for safety.”

In other words, don’t stuff filthy bedpans behind hospital bed skirts. Nightingale believed the vapors from bodily waste could be deadly.

“Even though germ theory had begun to take hold during Nightingale’s later life,” says Jessica Martucci, curator at the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, “the miasmatic theory of disease—that illness spread through dangerous vapors and smells given off by putrefying matter—remained a powerful framework for how people understood health and illness even into the 20th century.”

Whatever the theory, Nightingale’s emphasis on sanitation was sound. Her insistence that bedpans be emptied, cleaned and stored properly helped improve hospital conditions, reduce infections and save lives.

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By the time Nightingale died at age 90, she had helped medicine evolve immensely, elevating nursing from lowly work to a highly regarded profession. And as medicine evolved, inventors tried to innovate on the bedpan.

In the United States, the first bedpan-related patent appears as a component of an April 16, 1842, filing by Williams Woolley of New York City for an “Invalid Bedstead,” which featured “a hole in the sacking to receive a flanged metal bedpan.”

On September 22, 1868, Alvah Rittenhouse, a Philadelphia doctor, patented an odd-looking “Improved Female-Syringe Bed-Pan,” wherein the “fluid passes out and is sucked up by a suction tube, thereby avoiding any leakage.”

On February 18 of that same year, Hannah Conway of Dayton, Ohio, became the first woman with a bedpan-related patent when she incorporated the device into her “Improved Hospital-Bed.” “The patient, if unruly, is held in bed by the cover,” Conway wrote. “If the patient would go to stool, the bed is let down … and the bedpan is placed on the bed under him.”

And on September 25, 1877, Clark S. Merriman of New York City patented the first individually packaged bedpan, complete with an inflatable tube. “An air-cushion is attached,” he explained. “The advantages are that the body is supported in an elevated position, so that the excrements, when ejected, will not flow down the back.”

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By the 1880s, the bedpan industry was taking off. At least 26 bedpan-related patents had been issued by the end of the decade, covering improved lidded and rubber pans, a “douche apparatus” that doubled as a bedpan, and invalid hammocks and settees incorporating the device.

In 1897, Sears sold classic oval enamel bedpans for $1.60, which would amount to about $65 in 2026. The National Museum of American History safeguards a Meinecke “Perfection” bed and douche pan, patented on June 5, 1900, and billed as “the most comfortable and sanitary bedpan in the world.”

But the bedpan’s limitations have been recognized for decades. On January 8, 1951, Time suggested that the findings of a Journal of the American Medical Association study, concluding that patients used more oxygen—and, in turn, more energy—when using a bedpan than when using a bedside commode, “may foreshadow the bedpan’s end.”

That end never came. In 1985, the American Journal of Cardiac Rehabilitation published a study measuring patients’ heart rate, oxygen consumption and blood pressure while using a bedpan, reaffirming the concerns raised in 1951. The findings prompted nationally syndicated medical advice columnist Peter Gott to unleash on the device in his popular “Ask Dr. Gott” column:

“The bedpan is the source of all medical woes. It could become The Cause of the 1980s. We may properly excrete all our venom and frustration into (and take out our resentments on) the bedpan. This object of hate and defilement is designed to accept our emotional, as well as our physical, wastes. It serves no purpose other than to put a red ring on humanity’s behind.”

Forty years later, the obstinate bedpan persists, while manufacturers still try to refine the design.

“What was once a single standard design is now a range of specialized options,” says Stephanie Shelton of Medline, a major distributor of medical supplies. Today, the company offers the saddle-shaped Pontoon bedpan, space-saving Stack-a-Pan bedpans and the heavy-duty Durafit bedpan “tested to support user weight of up to 450 lbs.”

But how much can you really tweak a bedpan?

“It reminds me of the whole contest of making a better mousetrap. You can’t,” says Ott, of the National Museum of American History. “Bedpans capture the tension between dignity and embarrassment. You’re going to go in the pan, which is embarrassing, or you’re going to risk even more embarrassment by going on yourself. But what’s the alternative? That’s partly why they’re so disliked.”

“When interacting with a technology that hasn’t changed much, one that you can recognize, you can really put yourself in the place of somebody who lived in a very different context than you,” says Lisa Geiger, curator at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. “It’s a touchstone that can be very illustrative of the human experience.”

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For ages, the human experience has included bedpans. Whether they will ever disappear from our lives is as unknown as the fate of Eric Eakin’s collection. Now in his 70s, he is considering whether to donate it to a museum, bequeath it to his children or do something else altogether.

Whatever becomes of the collection, Eakin knows why it began.

“Did I start collecting bedpans in memory of my mother?” says Eakin. “I’d have to say ‘yes.’ She led me down this path. She was crazy. My mother could drink you under the table. She could tell the foulest joke you’ve ever heard in your life. She smoked cigarettes like they were going out of style. She was a piece of work. I know I have her genetics. And now I have her bedpan collection.”

In the end, it seems to be about love. The bedpan, for all its vileness, is a symbol of care and compassion—a reminder that sickness can strip away the ego, leaving us naked, baring our butts for all the world to see.

“When you’re out on the verge of life, when you are in such bad shape that you have to use a bedpan, the need to go makes everybody equal,” says Ott. “You can have big data and A.I. and molecular biology and high-tech instruments, but nothing has usurped the humble bedpan. Nothing outperforms the bedpan. It might even be eternal.”

The eternal bedpan reigns supreme. It keeps going. More important, in more ways than one, it helps keep us going.

And going.

And going.

Leo DeLuca 's work appears in The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, Popular Science and Pitchfork, among other media outlets. DeLuca, an award-winning writer, holds a Master of Arts in Science Journalism from Columbia Journalism School.