When Santorio Santorio began systematically weighing his food, drink, body, and everything that came out of it in the sixteenth century, it was not the eccentric hobby of a bored physician. He was doing something radically new: measuring. Through the careful measurement of excrement, he demonstrated that knowledge does not emerge from impressions, authority, or grand words, but from repeated observation, evidence, and data.
This lecture explores excrement as an unexpected hero in the history of knowledge. It shows how waste becomes information and how faeces can become a scientific argument. From Renaissance scales through modern medicine, the microbiome, archaeology, and wastewater analysis, it offers a passionate defence of a simple idea: science advances when we stop talking and start measuring.
