Re-Odorization, Disease, and Emotion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

This article argues that smell's place in nineteenth-century medicine and public health was distinctly ambiguous. Standard narratives in the history of smell argue that smell became less important in this period whilst also arguing that urban spaces were deodorized. The causal motor for the latter shift is medical theories about odour and miasma. By contrast, this article argues that sanitary practices of circulation, ventilation, and disinfection proceeded despite, not because of, medical attitudes to smell. Surgeons and physicians argued that odours were no indicator of disease causing matter and distrusted the use of smell because of its subjective qualities and resistance to linguistic definition. Yet these qualities made smell all the more powerful in sanitary literature, where it was used to generate a powerful emotional effect on readers. Histories of smell need to attend not just to deodorization but re-odorization; the disjuncture between practices of smelling and their textual or visual representation; and chronologies that track the shelving and re-deploying of ways of sensing in different times, places, and communities rather than tracking the de novo emergence of a modern Western sensorium. In mid-nineteenth-century England, smell retained its power, but that power now came from its rhetorical rather than epistemological force.

Scent Mining: Extracting Olfactory Events, Smell Sources and Qualities

“…We select this period because it represents a significant turning point in the cultural attitudes towards scent, especially in England. The sense of smell acquired an increasingly social significance and played a role in shaping both individual identities and those of specific places (Tullett, 2019a). For this purpose we split the extracted data in two parts, the first one covering the period from 1500 to 1799 and the second one from 1800 to 1930.…”

Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

“…We select this period because it represents a significant turning point in the cultural attitudes towards scent, especially in England. The sense of smell acquired an increasingly social significance and played a role in shaping both individual identities and those of specific places (Tullett, 2019a). For this purpose we split the extracted data in two parts, the first one covering the period from 1500 to 1799 and the second one from 1800 to 1930.…”