Dirt : A Social History as Seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt By Terence McLaughlin | Ersatz B.O.O.K.

not only were chamber-pots emptied into the streets, although there were enough of these. Offal from butchers' slaughter-houses, waste from tanneries, trimmings from vegetables and meat, fish heads, eel skins, and any food which had decayed too far even for those robust stomachs, all was shot into the kennel, the gutter that ran down the middle of each street. Unless a scavenger found some part of the rubbish useful, it might lie there for days, rotting, until rain came to carry it away, or at least transfer it from one street to another."

Many of the ascetics went further than simple neglect of their own bodies, and sought out lepers, sufferers from ulcers, and other people with the more disgusting and dirty diseases, so as to give the ascetic the chance to wash ulcered feet with his own hair, in the style of St. Mary Magdalene, to kiss leprous or ulcered skin, and generally wallow in the perverse delights of coprophilia."