ABSTRACT
The value of smell in assisting medical diagnosis is a staple of medical culture, and has attracted extensive critical commentary. Laurence Totelin (in Bradley 2015: 17–29) describes the significance accorded to olfaction by classical medical practitioners such as Galen, Celsus and Dioscorides of Anazarbus. As Richard Palmer (in Bynum and Porter 2004: 67) observes, these early writers proposed an influential and enduring linkage between stenches and illness: “At the most basic level bad smells deriving from the body or its products were symptoms of disease requiring investigation.” This association between malodour and illness was lent theoretical credence by treatises such as Galen’s The Olfactory Organ. His account of olfactory sensation, although by no means universally accepted, ascribes substance to odours: “Moreover that the head is at, once made painful and made heavy when filled by strong odours and sometimes the patients are seized with delirium is a sign that some of the material itself is carried into the brain” (Wright 1924: 11). The appealing logic of this assertion—that odours admit the substance of diseases into the body—is echoed in medieval theories of olfaction and disease and their indebtedness to classical precedent. Plagues, as Constance Classen suggests, were a frequent feature of medieval Europe, and were invariably attributed to malodour: “By far the most widely accepted cause of the plague, however, was foul odour caused by putrefaction” (Classen 1994: 59). Belief in the miasma theory of disease, and its correlation of foul-smelling air and epidemics, persisted into the nineteenth century, and inspired a range of sanitary reforms, epitomised by the Public Health Act of 1848 (Noble Tesh 1996: 30).
