7/9:The Cultural History of Smell

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Aroma - The Cultural History of Smell

This book is a rich experience for those who are sensualists of the scented world. It has been out for some time (1994, by Classon, Howes and Synnott) and is well known, but I personally have only just started reading it, and finding it an immense pleasure. I had expected it to be dry and academic, but while it is authoritative in an scholarly way, the information and descriptions are far from dry. It is full of astonishing, detailed information on the history of people's relationship to the sense of smell. The first chapter on the ancient world opens up a new (old) world, to different ways of thinking about the uses of beautiful scents. It describes how intensely involved people were with fragrances and how refined their tastes were. The enjoyment of the natural world was a greater part of daily life. Nature and its scented works was always in the foreground of people's experience, minds, and influenced their emotions, which historians and anthropologists know to be true from the historical records of art, poetry and archaeological evidence.

In Roman times people bathed daily, and great thought was put into the fragrances used to enhance the body after extensive beauty treatments for the skin and hair, for both sexes. The arms were rubbed with mint, strong concentrations of rosemary scented and conditioned the hair, and fresh clothing was scented with powdered floral and spiced substances that wafted their beauty as people moved. Garlands of flowers individually chosen for their symbolic value and particular scents were placed on the head and around the neck, and commonly offered with hospitality. Hopeful lovers decorated the exterior of the homes of their objects of affection with these garlands, making it clear to everyone that passed that someone loved lived there. People expressed their yearnings, creativity and mood through fragrances.

Very different than our day is also their use of perfumes and fragrant substances as part of public and communal events. Parades, theatrical gatherings and dinner parties were all scented in imaginative ways, with saffron and cinnamon, attar of roses and strong herbs. People rubbed mint into the wood of the dinner table. People scented their wine and vied in creating imaginative variations of scented experiences for the pleasure and stimulation of their guests. Flowers and fragrant herbs were used as carpets in the home, each room's fragrance calibrated for the tastes of the family members and for the frequent celebrations that were part of daily life. The incense burning in the temples scented the streets. This afforded a communal experience that sensually and mentally unified the crowds of people who all were experiencing the same scent at the public events and the frequent and large private entertainments. People offered each other perfume as we would a cup of coffee to a visitor. Of course in ancient times, perfumes were such that even if ingested upon heavy and repeated exposure, they would be delicious and probably even nourishing. In our day, if you drank perfume or overexposed yourself it might be poisonous or induce some kind of chemical reactivity or allergy. Because ancient perfumes were always natural and organic, they were not so dangerous or overpowering as those we are so frequently exposed to. Ingesting cinnamon, honey, rose petals, herbs, saffron, resins and balsams, and enjoying flowers in full scented bloom was not overwhelming or harmful. On the contrary, these prized public scent experiences were known to be only beneficial and enhancing the body's health.

It was the cultural habit of awareness and pleasure people routinely took in their sense of smell that allowed them to develop discernment of the subtleties and concentrations of the presence of scented beauty. Also interesting is that the even subtle flavor and scent of water and the varieties of honey or other foods were prized. The fertility of the earth was judged by its perfume, and the spring rains bringing out the earth's fragrance drying in the sun was consciously appreciated. Honey was heavily used in food, beauty treatments and for fragrances and especially prized when scented by the different flowers the bees used to create it. The flavor of water from different streams was extolled and enjoyed. Conscious enjoyment of the fragrance of fresh bread, vegetables and fruit was a strong element in the appreciation of the necessities of daily life. Other ancient cultures such as the Egyptian and Persian were also involved in the use of scents for enjoyment and as aids to clarifying the mind through the senses. Fragrances were used to enhance awareness of the present moment and for personal and communal spirituality, as well for all forms of physical sensuality and the heightening of sexual attraction. Of course those who were not wealthy enough to patronize the perfumers experienced the more precious fragrances primarily through the scented public entertainments, and religious processions. Bowls of perfume and aromatic substances were carried to scent the air, public fountains were perfumed for holidays and special occasions, and there was always the enjoyment of the natural seasonal changes and the scents associated with them.

I am looking forward to the chapter on the nineteenth century European poets such as Baudelaire whose personal influence on a renewed cultural appreciation of the sense of smell was so deep. Reading this book has expanded and renewed my own appreciation of our primal human connection to the strongest sense of all, the sense of smell. To read of historical records that depict a way of life that shows the connection to the world's beauty available to us all through the sense of smell is inspiring.

Read this book! (if you haven't already)...it is vivid and pleasurable and shows how the many scents and fragrances of life have imaginative uses with so much more potential application and dimension than we presently employ.

Image above, Wall Fragment with Cupids and Psyche making Perfume Roman 50-75 CE Fresco
Los Angeles, Getty Villa. Credits: Barbara McManus, 2006

Smell
The Secret Seducer

---

By PIET VROON
with Anton van Amerongen and Hans de Vries
Translated by Paul Vincent
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Read the Review

The History of Smelling

The nose is centrally located on the human face; it is a perennial in fashion and cosmetics, and indispensable for those of us who wear eyeglasses. In social and cultural life and literature, too, the nose is a familiar feature--one need look no further than the many proverbs, sayings, nicknames, and terms of abuse that relate to this striking part of the face.

The nose also forms the external section of the olfactory organ, however, and as such it does not receive the attention it deserves. For example, too few people are aware that breathing through the nose is vital to both physical and mental health. This method of breathing ensures that the air is to some extent warmed and filtered, and in addition it creates the correct pressure in the arteries in the chest cavity. Finally, one smells more when one breathes through the nose, which generally benefits mood and memory.

The Importance of Smell

Taste and smell together are the so-called chemical senses, meaning that stimuli associated with them are chemically based. In many respects the sense of smell is mysterious--not only because little is known about its operation as yet, but also because most people are insufficiently aware of its importance. When people are asked what sense they would be prepared to do without if necessary, smell comes at the top of the list and sight at the bottom. This is a debatable choice, given that smell plays a significant part in many psychic processes and behavior patterns. Smell is essential for the operation of the sense of taste; it affects one's sex life, motivation and memory processes (including learning, health and feelings of security and well-being); and it has an alarm function in life-threatening situations (for instance, in detecting gas fumes, etc.). What is more, in "competition" (that is, when several senses are stimulated simultaneously), the nose often comes out on top. A beautiful-looking apple that smells rotten does not whet our appetite.

A Brief Cultural History

Historically, the debate over the status of smell has been a complicated one; in Western countries in particular, thinking on this sense has had a decidedly ambiguous quality. Plato denounced perfumes because they played into the hands of effeminacy and physical pleasure; the use of aromatics was reserved for prostitutes. In his view the virtuous should be concerned mainly with cultivating the good of their souls through music and mathematics. The body with all its odors was only the temporary tomb of the soul; moreover, because of its position close to the brain, the nose was in direct contact with feelings and desires that were better banished. Socrates was somewhat less dogmatic in this matter: he felt that odors reflected the social class to which a person belonged, meaning that an odor had a certain informative value.

In general, though, Plato regarded the eye and the ear as more important aids than the nose. In social intercourse, hearing and particularly sight are "noble" activities, he believed, because those senses bring us into contact with the world of perfection. Geometry is discovered through sight; the Pythagoreans' music of the spheres is "heard"; taste is already somewhat ambiguous, and many philosophers considered touching and smelling vulgar and often rather sordid activities. Man walks upright--so went another common line of reasoning, also put forward by Freud--which means that with the aid of his faculty of sight man can see what is happening around him from a long way off. Unlike animals, it was claimed, we scarcely need smell, any more than we need a tail. The idea is not absurd. Many odors are heavier than air, so that one smells more when lying on the ground than when standing.

Later philosophers wrote scarcely anything about smell, and if they did (one example is Kant at the end of the eighteenth century), they generally disparaged this sense. Partly as a result, virtually no research was carried out into the operation of the sense of smell, while a great deal of attention was paid to the sense of sight.

During the "scientific revolution," the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, great emphasis was placed on the intellect. Human rationality was seen as the engine of progress. This meant that a certain contempt arose for emotions and for the body as a whole. That also applied to smell, since that sense is associated with (unpleasant) bodily and breath odors among other things--a view that was in the tradition of both Plato and Kant.

On the other hand, with regard to smell and the importance of the senses in general, a part was also played by English empiricism, which located the source of all knowledge in the senses. Given the idea that knowledge was based entirely on experience, many scientific researchers (and the doctors and chemists who collaborated with them) started using their senses, including smell, in a more intensive way. It is remarkable that it took so long to discover a link between smells and chemical substances. The renowned Dutch physician Boerhaave, for example, still believed that an odor was based on a separate "fluidum," called spiritus rector, which was supposed to be oily character. The same applied to the air: chemists did not know initially that air consists of a mixture of elements and compounds.

However, the major impulse which led to the increasing attention paid to smell, particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, came from medicine. Because of a lack of understanding of the nature and origin of (infectious) diseases, doctors and researchers sought the cause of all kinds of ailments and epidemics, including plague and malaria (literally "bad air"), in noxious vapors (miasmas) released from rotting corpses, urine and feces, swamps, vapors that rose from cracks after earthquakes (according to the physica subterranea, the bowels of the earth contained a quite dangerous "stench laboratory," capable of making mankind sick), down to the feather bed or "a veritable hodgepodge of mephitic exhalations," as someone wrote (mephitic means both stinking and poisonous). Those miasmas were commonly found in hospitals and prisons, where not only many inmates but also many lawyers were supposed to have died as a result of the stench. As late as the nineteenth century judges visiting prisons tried to protect themselves against typhus by surrounding themselves with "antimephitic" odors.

One doctor of the period observed that the smell of his flatulence was virtually indistinguishable from the smell of the cadavers in the dissecting room. The processes of decomposition in the intestines and the principle of life were a unity within a living organism, he surmised, but the other side of the coin was that noxious odors were also absorbed through the skin. It was even conceivable that breathing in the last gasp of a dying person through one's nose might prove fatal, because the deadly poison rushed to the brain. One must also be careful about inhaling the breath of cattle; this might result in attacks of colic and nausea. (Garlic was used until late in the nineteenth century to ward off evil spirits.) Doctors preferred to examine the patient with one hand, while with the other they held under their nose boxes filled with amber, sulphur and a kind of incense. Next of kin and others interested in visiting the sick were instructed to dress in thick clothes and told not to swallow their saliva but to spit it out.

This line of thinking led to a frantic hunt for "antimephitic remedies," which could eliminate both the stench and the danger of disease, a hunt that eventually led to the lighting of fires, to which a purifying action was ascribed, and only much later to the discovery of disinfectants such as bleach (1788). Some chemists went so far as to gird themselves with jars in order to collect their bodily odors for closer analysis; an Italian canon hired beggars for this purpose, enclosing them in leather bags up to their waists.

At the time, puerperal fever was attributed to the atmosphere and not to hands infected with microorganisms. As a result, the Hungarian doctor Semmelweis was ridiculed when in 1847 he claimed that puerperal fever could be prevented if doctors and obstetricians washed their hands before each treatment (the delivery room was close to the mortuary). Semmelweis believed that an "infectious substance" deriving from the mortuary caused this serious illness. Despite the fact that when hand washing was practiced the death rate among mothers in childbirth fell by 90 percent, there was such violent opposition to this idea that Semmelweis was forced to leave Vienna. Only after several decades (and many hundreds of unnecessary deaths) were his ideas accepted.

Because odors were supposed to reveal what was happening in the body, an extensive system of diagnosis was developed on the basis of the smells of sweat, breath and blood, as well as urine, stools, sputum, ulcers, pus and even the gaps between toes and under the armpits (the foundation for these practices was laid in the eleventh century by the Arab physician Avicenna). And as far as medical instruments were concerned: the stethoscope did not come into general use because it enabled the doctor to hear what was going on in the body better; rather, it permitted the doctor to avoid unnecessary contact with stench. Conversely, doctors used scents in therapy (aromatherapy, osmotherapy, herbal baths). Particularly volatile, warm, oily and aromatic substances as well as "air cures" in the mountains were supposed to ensure that the "vital spirits" started flowing properly again through the (hypothetical) tubes in the body.

Since bodily and breath odors were regarded as deriving from habits of life and the quality of vital juices, there were powerful pronouncements in other areas too. It was claimed that women's bodily fluids could be spoiled through excessive sexual intercourse (through too much semen, that is). Because of this prostitutes were referred to as les putains, "the stinking ones" (a term used in antiquity by the poet Juvenal). Homosexuals also had a hard time of it. These people were often found in the vicinity of public latrines, and the animal stench that surrounded them was taken to represent their "anality." Another view held by doctors in the past was that sperm stimulates the organs and fibers of the body; the seed produces the stench given off by strong men, which eunuchs are deprived of. The bodily and breath odors of the virile man were (therefore) called the aura seminalis. Rage was supposed to heighten a man's bodily smell even further, as it accelerated the breakdown of gall. Such notions led many experts to advise men not to wash: this might cause them to lose their sexual attraction. For their part, women's aura was permeated with milk: "Our women sweat milk, urinate milk, chew and pass milk when they blow their noses, and excrete milk with their stools," wrote one doctor in a manual on chronic diseases.

Because of the fear of disease and epidemics, the unimaginable stench that prevailed almost everywhere led to interventions by "hygienists" and municipal health boards. The hygienists succeeded in combating the stench in cities, hospitals, prisons and private dwellings. Closed sewage systems were constructed, ventilators and bellows positioned, factories shut down, hospitals equipped with commodes and chamber pots, churchyards treated with salt, lime and sulphuric acid, cesspits emptied, codes of conduct for sewage workers drawn up, stinking marshes drained, walls, vaults and woodwork plastered, filled, painted and whitewashed to combat miasmas; even furniture was treated with antimephitic varnish. One Scottish hygienist went so far as to smash the windows of workers' homes in order to let loose the stench.

As in Plato's time, the predominantly negative significance given to smell and all kinds of odors led many scholars to assign this sense a place at the bottom of the hierarchy of senses: "as the sense of lust, desire and impulse it carries the stamp of animality," as someone wrote. Most smells were to be gotten rid of.

Apart from the medical perspective, the association of smell with animality was also justified in the following terms: animals sniff a lot and, moreover, man is often not capable of expressing smells in language, a capacity which is quintessentially human and testifies to civilization. Therefore smell was supposed to have more animal than human traits. We still find traces of this view in the value attached to certain occupations. Those who deal with stench tend to be low on the social ladder: the sewage worker, the toilet lady, the garbageman, the farmhand.

Against the background of these views the washing of the human body led to heated disputes. One school of thought held that if you kept yourself dirty you could prevent miasmas from penetrating your unprotected skin; moreover, your body would he weakened by frequent contact with water. What's more, if you bathed too often you were running the risk of becoming sexually unattractive; you might even end up infertile. Others believed, however, that you could rid your body of sickly exhalations by cleaning your skin, as a result of which many bathing regulations were drawn up. You should clean at least the visible parts of your body, such experts believed, with the ideal being the mother-of-pearl skin in which you could see the blue blood coursing through your veins. A translucent body was the mirror of a pure soul; at the same time, this sort of washing was a way to curb women's passions. Bathing was useful for restraining sexual urges, as one Father Marie de Saint Ursin proclaimed at the beginning of the nineteenth century: "If a pale girl ... seeks out solitude and gives herself over to melancholy fantasies, then a prolonged hot bath may moderate the causes of this erotic orgasm." (Victims of passion were also advised to lead a sedentary life, stay in the shade, and wear gloves to protect their hands.) After bathing--a ritual which must certainly not be performed more than once a week--the woman must keep her eyes closed when drying her genitalia, and young girls were advised to stir up the water to prevent the surface from becoming a mirror when they got into the bath. After the "second shiver," the unfortunate persons rested from their exertions.

Not all scientific researchers, philosophers and artists stressed rationality to the extent that the Enlightenment philosophers did. Rousseau and Goethe recognized the great importance of intuition and emotional involvement, in the pursuit of science too, and even praised the sense of smell. Indeed, in the Romantic period, such concepts as Sturm und Drang and Weltschmerz, and artistic expressions like Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht and the nocturnes of Chopin, attached great importance to feelings and emotional life in general, including unpleasant smells. The Romantics tried to overcome the limitations of bourgeois existence by living in seclusion, plumbing their feelings, seeking intoxication (by using stimulants, etc.) and losing themselves in melancholy (the paradis artificiels we find in Baudelaire). Eroticism, too, regained some esteem as a vital part of life.

Apart from these philosophical considerations, there was a simple yet universal change in the attitude toward the sense of smell: because of developments in chemistry and (later) bacteriology, doctors began using their noses much less. However, the conviction that stench does not normally contain germs dates only from about 1880. And while the Romantics glorified sensual happiness, including smell, not everyone agreed. The sense of smell was still primarily associated with sex; both were considered reprehensible in many Western cultures, again because of their age-old associations with animality. By Freud's time smell had emerged again (temporarily) at least in the literature, albeit negatively (in Freud's view smell was most closely linked with feces and with the "anal phase" of psychological development).

Another influential figure was Freud's contemporary and associate W. Fliess, the ear, nose and throat specialist. Fliess developed a comprehensive "nose theory" of sexuality, claiming, for example, that there was a "reflex neurosis," based on connections between smell and the genitals. Fliess performed minor operations on the inside of the nose in order to alleviate psychic and gynecological ailments. The administering of cocaine was also part of his therapeutic arsenal.

At this time "animal" smells like leather and musk were regarded as aphrodisiacs. Here is Zola, the Naturalist par excellence: "With the aid of a piece of musk she abandons herself to forbidden delights. She is in the habit of surreptitiously sniffing it. She drugs herself with it until orgiastic convulsions overwhelm her." And Balzac: "In the boarding school the mephitism of the walls, the stench of the staff and the semen smell of the invigilator and the masturbating pupils mounted. This stench, experienced as typically male, heightens the desire for the presence of women." "Shit in the boots, piss out of the window, cry shit, have a good crap, fart loudly, smoke like a chimney, belch in people's faces," Flaubert advised a friend. During Queen Victoria's state visit to France in 1855, there was an outcry at court, where the sensitive noses of the ladies thought they detected her wearing perfume containing a little musk.

In short, Western cultures have had a love-hate relationship with the sense of smell. And if we look at the war waged nowadays in the commercials over sanitary pads, tampons, diapers for infants and adults, sweet-smelling soaps, skin-care products, deodorants, perfumes and the like, we can say that smell is considered important once again.

It is striking that history seems to be repeating itself to some extent. Just as in the past the atmosphere and odors were blamed for countless evils on the basis of almost hysterical prejudices, something similar is happening today with those who are HIV-positive and AIDS patients. In the view of many celebrated researchers, including the discoverer of the virus, L. Montagnier, it is not certain that the HIV virus alone is a sufficient precondition for the devastation of the human immune system (he claims that much more would be needed); moreover, one must receive a substantial amount of the virus directly or indirectly in one's blood. Nevertheless, many people believe that it is better not to touch people who are HIV-positive, to avoid contact with their clothes even, and by all means to keep from kissing them. Since there is no indication of any risk whatsoever in such actions, an obvious analogy presents itself with the absurd advice about avoiding smells given to those visiting the sick centuries ago.

Smell and Science

The scientific world is still not very much interested in the olfactory organ: the number of researchers worldwide is a few hundred at most. There are various possible explanations for this.

Scents and associated olfactory sensations are not nearly as easy to measure or map as stimuli and observations based on light and sound: after all, a scent has no wavelength or other easily measurable property. Moreover, olfactory sensations are triggered by chemical substances of very different kinds, which are difficult to group under a single common denominator. Our knowledge of the operation of the sense of smell is so poor that we do not know exactly what properties of chemical substances cause the sensations. Strictly speaking, we don't even know whether chemical characteristics of substances are responsible for olfactory sensations, or whether, to mention just one possibility, the shape of the molecule is responsible (the key-lock principle or the so-called stereochemical theory). A researcher has expressed this uncertainty as follows: "It is still impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy whether a chemical compound will have a smell, and if so, what qualitative properties that smell will have." That is no small admission, certainly compared with our knowledge of other senses.

Olfactory research also has many technical problems to contend with. Odors can interact with their environment in all kinds of ways before we perceive them. This means that the experimental area and the equipment used must be odor-free, and that the researcher must be very familiar with the doses used. Only in the second half of the twentieth century have researchers developed good "olfactometers"--apparatus for administering carefully calculated quantities of odors.

Research is further complicated by the fact that people display wide differences both in their sensitivity to smells and in their appreciation of smells. All kinds of diseases or congenital defects may underlie these differences, but even among normal, healthy people the sense of smell varies enormously. Two extremes are general anosmia, an inability to smell, and hyperosmia, an oversensitivity to olfactory stimuli. Moreover, depending on the circumstances there is also a great deal of variation within the same individual: one processes the smell of fried eggs differently the morning after a drinking binge than on the evening of the same day after a healthy ramble through the woods. "There are days when I am moved by the slightest smell; on others, far more numerous, I smell nothing," Maine de Biran wrote in 1815, noting the favorable days, like May 13 of that year, when "the wonderfully perfumed air that I breathe in makes me glad to be alive."

In general, women have a keener sense of smell than men and older people regain their olfactory capacity less quickly than younger people after an "olfactory bombardment." The range of smells on offer also varies from country to country and village to village. As a result, it is possible for people to lose their ability to distinguish certain smells to a greater or lesser extent through conditioning; members of a particular culture, for example, may develop extreme sensitivity to certain (say, dangerous) smells.

Finally, the world of smells is difficult to pin down in concrete terms. The available vocabulary for describing smells is very limited. Often smells are simply related back to their supposed source. "This smells of coffee" or "It smells like after a thunderstorm in August here." The results of a recent experiment demonstrate this relative inability: different respondents described the smell of isobutyraldehyde as that of "chocolate," "peanut butter sandwich," "sickly and dry," "sour milk," "codfish," "endives" or "cocoa"; strikingly, a third of those involved could not describe the smell in any terms at all.

This phenomenon can be understood partly on the basis of evolution. In evolutionary terms the sense of smell is an old one, with relatively few direct connections with the youngest part of this brain--namely, the left neocortex, a system which houses, for example, "language centers." It does have many well-developed connections with older brain structures that regulate emotions and motivation, including the so-called limbic system, the brain stem or the "neural chassis," together with the "president" of the hormonal system, the hypophysis or pituitary gland. Via the pituitary gland, smell influences general bodily function (hormone production). One result of this construction is that we do not in the first instance rationalize and verbalize what we smell, but have an immediate reaction to a smell and a tendency to act in accordance with it. In other words, people do not generally convert as olfactory perception into a considered intellectual judgment followed by consciously controlled behavior; smelling something generally leads to emotionally colored and sometimes even instinctive actions.

The commercial interests of the cosmetics and food industries play important parts in olfactory research, and olfactory researchers generally profit from government and industrial support. Over and against this support (and perhaps because of it), no research of importance has been carried out into topics like olfactory disorders, which often have serious consequences (such as memory problems and depressions), or into substances that may affect our moods, performance and possibly diseases. For example, there are indications that Alzheimer's disease originates with a decline in the olfactory capacity, a process which might be preventable.

It is both reprehensible and strange that so little attention is paid to the way in which smells (apart from perfumes) can affect our behavior, our social interaction and our well-being. After all, everybody knows that factors such as excessive noise, poor ventilation and the color or temperature of artificial lighting affect our well-being, so why is there almost no research into how we are affected by smells?

(C) (C) 1997 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-374-25704-3