Aromatics and the Soul: a Study of Smells

CHAPTER 1. Olfaction and Public Health

OLFACTION AND PUBLIC HEALTH

I sing of smells, of scents, perfumes, odours, whiffs and niffs; of aromas, bouquets and fragrances; and also, though temperately and restrainedly I promise you, of effluvia, reeks, fœtors, stenches, and stinks.

A few years ago I stood before the public singing another song. By no means a service of praise it was, but something of the order of a denunciatory psalm, wherein I invoked the wrath of the high gods upon such miscreants as make life hideous with din.

You must not think that imprecations cannot be sung. All emotional utterance is song, said Carlyle; only he said it not quite so briefly. And, leaving on one side the vituperations of his enemies by King David (if he it was who wrote the Psalms) which we still chant upon certain days of the Christian year, it may be remembered that in bygone times when the medical practitioner was a wizard (or a witch) and uttered his (or her) spell to stay the arrows of Apollo, it not infrequently contained a denunciation of some brother (or sister) practitioner of the art (how times are changed!), and it was known, in Rome at all events, as a carmen, a song. Hence, say the etymologists, the English word “charm,” which still, of course, characterises the modern witch, if not the modern wizard—neither of whom, we may add, is nowadays a medical practitioner.

Besides, denunciations are, of course, grunted and growled with more or less of a semblance of singing in modern opera. To substantiate my words I need only mention that interminable scene—or is it an act?—of gloom and evil plottings by Telramund and Ortrud in Lohengrin.

But if I am again singing, this time, I trust, my voice will sound in the ears of my hearers less shrill, less strident, less of a shriek. For, in sooth, the present theme is one upon which we are justly entitled, in so far as England and Scotland at all events are concerned, to raise what would be a Nunc Dimittis of praise and thanksgiving, were it not that the price of cleanly air like that of liberty is eternal vigilance, seeing that our nostrils are no longer offended by the stenches our forefathers had to put up with. That they endured such offences philosophically, cheerfully even, laughing at the unpleasantness as men do at a bad smell, is true. Nevertheless most people in those days probably felt as much objection to a vile odour as Queen Elizabeth, for example, did, the sharpness of whose nose, her biographers tell us, was only equalled by the sharpness of her tongue.

Irishmen who do me the honour of tasting this light omelette of scientific literature will have noticed, I am sure, that I have not included the sister isle in my olfactory paradise. And indeed, I hesitated long before passing it over, because I am a man of peace—at any price where the Land of Ire is concerned. But alas! I am by nature truthful and only by art mendacious. And there sticks horrible to my memory the fumous and steamy stench of parboiled cabbage that filled the restaurant-car of the train for Belfast—yes! Belfast, not Dublin—one evening as I landed at Kingstown. The sea had been—well! it was the Irish Sea, and I stepped on to the train straight from the mail-boat, so that ... in a word, I remember that luscious but washy odour too vividly to bestow upon Ireland the white flower of a stenchless life.

In these remarks I have been careful to observe that the train was not the Dublin train, but if any one feels moved to defend the capital city, let him first of all take a stroll down by the Liffey as it flows fermenting and bubbling under its bridges, and then ... if he can....

Let me, however, in justice to that grief-stricken country, spray a little perfume over my too pungent observations. I can also recall after many years a warm and balmy evening in the town of Killarney, the peaceful close to a day of torrential rain. The setting sun, glowing love through its tears, was reddening the sky and the dark green hills around, those hills of Ireland where surely, if anywhere on this earth, heaven is foreshadowed. And linked in memory with that evening’s glory there comes, like the gentle strain of a long-forgotten song, the rich, pungent smell of turf-smoke eddying blue from low chimneys into the soft air of the twilight. Ireland! Ireland! What an atmosphere of love and grief that name calls up! Surely the surf that beats upon the strands of Innisfail far away is more salt, more bitter, and perhaps for that very reason more sweet, than the waters of any of the other beaches that ocean bathes!

Thence also comes a memory of heliotrope. It grew by a cottage just beyond a grey granite fishing-harbour in Dublin Bay, and brings also, with its faint, ineffable fragrance, the same inseparable blending of emotions that clings, itself a never-dying odour, to the memory of holidays in Ireland. There is a phrase in a song, simple, sentimental, even silly if you like, that prays for “the peace of mind dearer than all.”

“But what,” I remember asking the mother of our party—“what is meant by ‘peace of mind’?” Her wistful smile seemed to me to be a very inadequate reply to my question—which, by the way, I am still asking.

It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its inhabitants.

The reason assigned by the man in the street for this reform was, and indeed still is, that stenches breed epidemic diseases. In a noisome smell people imagine a deadly pestilence, probably because patients affected with such epidemic diseases as smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria, give off nauseating odours. Now, bad smells from drains and cesspools do not of themselves induce epidemic disease. Nevertheless, there is this much of truth in the superstition, that where you have bad smells you have also surface accumulations of filth, and these, soaking through soil and subsoil, contaminate surface wells, until it only requires the advent of a typhoid or other “carrier” to set a widespread epidemic a-going. Further, as recent investigators have shown us, the loathsome and deadly typhus fever, known for years to be a “filth-disease,” is carried by lice, which pests breed and flourish where bodily cleanliness is neglected and personal odours are strong.

So that in this, as in most superstitions, there is a substratum of truth.

But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to translate its urgings into practice.

The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading to a general popular reformation?

The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred, to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with the evil thing.

Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated: either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action. And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.

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