Scents and Sensibility

...Gone are sentimental notions of bucolic villages and picturesque folk, to be replaced by the ubiquity of shit...

...and in his Conclusion he makes a plea for further investigations like his own: "Social history, respectful toward the humble but deaf for too long to the expression of emotion, must no longer suppress people's elementary reactions, however sordid...

...Jean-Noel Halle, first holder ofthe chair of public health established in Paris in 1794, traced the decay of fecal matter, distinguishing the odors of cesspools from those of latrines, fresh excrement from stale...

...Yet only a few generations ago everybody smelled bad...

...Pursuing one of these, researchers for more than a century carefully and rigorously catalogued smells...

...Attention to scent was only the beginning of wisdom, and an elaborate discipline emerged out of the needs of doctors and public health officials: osphresiology, the science of smells...

...Cheese lovers, it must be admitted, have known this all along...

...In the cities, people emptied their chamber pots in the streets, in the country they lived alongside their animals...

...The historian Michelet sought inspiration for his writing in a woman's menstrual odors, as well as through the scents of latrines...

...Corbin possesses neither a winning style (insofar as one can judge from Miriam L. Kochan's translation) norastrongsenseof organization...

...One expert demanded that agricultural workers be prevented from sleeping with their faces to the ground...

...On an individual level people, beginning with the educated elite and wealthy bourgeoisie, started emphasizing personal cleanliness, although it would be many years before the widespread adoption of water closets and washrooms...

...This world of smells and smelling would be overturned in the late 19th century after Pasteur discovered the dangers of bacteria...

...That change, with its enormous consequences for the way people lived, is the subject of his book...

...This, says Corbin, was a turning point in the development of public sanitation...

...Having arrived at the figure of Pasteur and germ theory, it simply drifts off, dying with a whimper...

...The smells of refuse, stagnant water, cesspools, offal, even corpses, were facts of daily life...

...To put this another w ay, in future years we may find ourselves living in a much smellier environment...

...The warnings ofthe experts were abetted by changes in fashion, a growing Rousseauistic taste for simplicity and the natural, until by the end of the 18 th century the French public was exhibiting a "reduced threshold of tolerance" for smells...

...The effects of this shift began to be felt in every sector of life...

...No less than the filth itself, the stench of filth was valued for its medicinal qualities, and also as a sexual stimulant...

...Progress has many byways, numerous dead ends...

...Others specialized in swamps and human sweat...

...Following a cholera epidemic in 1832, the government launched a national disinfection and deodorization campaign that highlighted the new concerns...

...Certainly, it was an inspiration to look at odor from a historical perspective, for no subject is so commonplace and at the same time so capable of evoking deep and irrationally reflexive feelings of disgust...

...Whenthemass-es clung to the old ways, demonstrating their "loyalty to filth,' odor was converted into a sign of class and, later, racial division...

...No one, for example, had to explain to farmers the worth of human excrement as fertilizer, while sewage and waste products were widely believed to prevent disease...

...Cause and effect are murky throughout...

...Linearity can be an overpraised virtue, particularly when a writer is trying to capture something as subtle as a change in sensibility, but there are moments here when the only things a reader can hold on to are the anecdotes and the material's overall oddity...

...Perfumers, perhaps the foremost beneficiaries of these taxonomical labors, had created their own esthetics of scents by the 1850s...

...Writers & Writing SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY BY BARRYGEWEN Alain Corbin, professor of contemporary history at Tours' Universite Fran?ois Rabelais, knows he is on to something with his innovative study The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Harvard, 307 pp., $25.00...

...It was bathing that was considered unhygienic, causing infertility and diminishing beauty...

...Breaking wind in public was an approved practice...

...This is in keeping with the rest of the book, which is more fun to describe than to read...

...What was worse, the vapors emanated from the most ordinary of substances-wood, plaster, blood, even from mud, soil and fissures in the earth...

...By 1840, sanitary experts were stressing the dangers of smells emanating from family members, and private households, like pub-licspaces, becametargets for deodorization...

...Cesspools were cleaned up and cemeteries moved away from populated areas...

...Corbin demonstrates that the rejection of odor is a surprisingly recent development, and if Hegel is right about the owl of Minerva Hying out at dusk—if, that is, we acquire knowledge about a phenomenon only when it is reaching its end— then this book may bean indication that the drive for a deodorized society is itself on the way to becoming a thing of the past...

...Infants padded about unswathed, free to urinate and defecate at will...

...In a related development at the time, doctors were learning, so to speak, to sniff out disease...

...Ernest Monin released a hefty study on the odors of the human body...

...It is no exaggeration to say the past stank...

...The Foul and the Fragrant has a quality of freshness and originality about it similar to that of two other volumes which gave us insights into ourselves by examining changes in areas unthinkingly considered impervious to change—Philippe Aries' Centuries ofChildhood and Michel Foucault' s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason...

...The ardor of romantic suitors was awakened by the aroma of their loved ones' underarms...

...It was in the hospital, for instance," that the individual bed became a piece of territory and was transformed into a spatial unit...

...According to Corbin, "the increased attention to social odors was the major event in the history of olfaction in the 19th century before Pasteur's theories triumphed...

...The competent physician had to be able to distinguish between them—no simple task, since this meant knowing how a particular patient ought to smell according to age, sex, occupation, and a host of other categories...

...As recently as the end of the 19th century, it was said that most Frenchwomen died without ever having taken a bath .Underwear was infrequently changed...

...They were noticed, and rejected, as never before...

...Victims of tuberculosis were advised to inhale animal vapors...

...Nor is it only on the past that Corbin forces us to direct our thoughts...

...Is there any more cutting remark than to say a person smells bad...

...Filth was not merely accepted, it was esteemed...

...Topics are discussed, dropped, then picked up again, seemingly at whim...

...But a century earlier, what Corbin calls "loyalty to filth" had already begun a slow decline that evolved into our own radically deodorized sensibility...

...In the Middle Ages, both castle and hovel were so immersed in muck that, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie points out, "villagers carried around with them a whole fauna of fleas and lice: people not only scratched themselves, but friends and relations from all levels in the social scale deloused one another...

...The primary instigators of the new sensibility, says Cor-bin, were a group of 18th-century doctors, chemists and sanitary professionals who, influenced by the theories of John Locke, stressed the danger to public health of putrid miasmas...

...Personal cleanliness was almost nonexistent—bathing and the brushing of teeth were rare, shampooing unknown...

...Thetimehascome," he declares in his Introduction, "to trace the conflict-laden history of the perception of smells...

...Imposing tomes were produced by a number of authorities during the 1820s, "the golden age of osphresiology," and as late as 1885 Dr...

...The danger was all around, and the best instrument for detecting it was the nose...

...Corbin's book, we are told in the Foreword, has already had "a dazzling impact in France...

...The narrative jumps back and forth in time with dizzying insistence...

...Our current dislike of pungent odors is a matter of taste, of fashion, not of necessity, and the earmark of fashion is change...

...In part a history of science, The Foul and the Fragrant reminds us that the road of enlightenment is not a straight line...

...Grandmothers passed on to mothers the folk wisdom that "the dirtier children are, the healthier they are...

...Prisons, ships, barracks, hospitals, places where cramped conditions were a norm, wereobjectsof special attention...

...There were healthy odors and sickly ones...

...Our sense of repugnance in the presence of pungent odors is a learned, not a natural, response, and therefore a fit topic for the historian, though one that has largely been neglected until now...

...Inhaling these poisons, they argued, could cause gangrene, syphilis and, most likely of all, scurvy...

...His book shows that, contrary to general belief, no absolute link exists between health or cleanliness and deodorization...

...Nonetheless, now that he has succeeded in introducing odor into history, the past will never be quite the same again...

...He concludes by stating that "without knowledge of that history, we can neither measure the visceral depths to which the 19th-century social conflicts reached nor explain the present vitality of the ecological dream.' J^n a sense, The Foul and the Fragrant never really does conclude...

...In 1766 Madame Thiroux d'Arconville, "an incomparable observer of odors," published a 600-page book detailing her work on the decomposition of over 300substances...

...Architects increasingly focused on providing proper ventilation, chemists produced new techniques for fumigation, and city planners worried about overcrowding...

...Like a conceptual artist, Corbin is to be praised more for the brilliance of his idea than for its execution...

...Goethe stole the bodice of a ladyfriend so that he could sniff it in private...