The Humble History of the Bedpan

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!

My collection is worth a lot of money,” says Eakin. 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.

When the very first bedpan was used by humans, however, is impossible to say. 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.