The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs by David S Barnes ~ perfume books

Posted by Cheryl on 23 July 2010 34 Comments

Great Stink of Paris Fill up your pomanders, take out your nosegays: it’s going to be a hot summer. “In the late summer of 1880 in Paris, death was in the air and it smelled like excrement.” So begins David S. Barnes’s history of the birth and dissemination of public health in France. The author shows that scientific discovery alone did not change the way a nation understood sanitation and the spread of disease. Eberth and Klebs’s isolation of the typhoid bacillus (1880), Roux’s diphtheria antitoxin (1884), Pasteur’s work on anthrax (1881) and development of the rabies vaccine (1885) were the talk of the town, but that wasn’t enough. It took a convergence of ideas (new scientific knowledge, persistent folk etiologies of contagion, a shift in political thinking toward Republican positivism, increased secularization, France’s mission to “civilize” the peasantry and colonies) to garner acceptance of germ theory and support for sanitation control.

Barnes focuses on the years between 1885 1880 and 1895, a period framed by two “Great Stinks” in Paris intrusive enough to spark public outcry, political debate, and relentless commentary in the daily papers. One front-page cartoon, lampooning the government’s slow response to the stench disaster, includes a transposition of the city motto fluctuat nec mergitur [it is tossed by the waves but it does not sink] to fluctuat et merditur [it is tossed by the waves and it — well, you get it]. Each smelly summer incited outrage, but by 1895 — though offended and disgusted — the public no longer feared that the fetid stench of Paris streets would cause death and disease. The author coins the term ”sanitary-bacteriological synthesis” (SBS) to explain how during the time between these two events, public health reformers brought pre-Pasteurian beliefs (that foul smelling emanations are bad for you) into harmony with new scientific knowledge about the dangers of microbes (which might be accompanied by foul smells).

Why did Paris stink in the nineteenth-century…

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Concepts of Cleanliness by Georges Vigarello ~ perfume books

Posted by Marcello on 7 April 2008 16 Comments

Concepts of Cleanliness by Georges Vigarello I recently came across two books on hygiene and body culture: Douglas Mackaman's Leisure Settings (1998), on the history of health spas in France, and Katherine Ashenburg's The Dirt on Clean (2007), on changing attitudes towards body odor through the ages. I haven't read either one of them yet, but from what I understand, both explore fields that are closely related to the work of French historian Georges Vigarello. I've been meaning to review his book Concepts of Cleanliness for quite some time; it's not seldom that words like 'clean' and 'dirty' appear in perfume reviews — take Robin's recent post on Guerlain Shalimar for example — and it's nice to put their meaning in a cultural perspective. Vigarello's book is a scholarly work on hygiene and cleanliness, and sets the record straight on some widespread historical misconceptions. Originally published in 1985 (right before Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant), it covers the period between the late Middle Ages and the 19th century, painting a vivid picture of washing and bathing rituals in France. The author dismisses the common assumption that the Middle Ages were simply 'dirty', and quotes from travel journals, etiquette books and other period documents to reveal that by our modern standards, personal hygiene reached an absolute low point during the 17th and 18th century…

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The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick ~ perfume book review

Posted by Marcello on 26 May 2007 11 Comments

In my review of Constance Classen's book Aroma (February 2006) I wrote about the growing academic interest for the culture of smell. Not long after that, a wonderful anthology entitled The Smell Culture Reader was published, with excerpts and essays from various renowned (and some lesser known) authors. This massive book (442 pages, 36 articles) brings together some of the finest contemporary writings on smell and its philosophical and cultural implications. Divided into seven sections, it covers a number of frequently recurring topics in this genre, such as scent and sexuality, smell psychology, and fragrance aesthetics. But it tackles less common themes as well, like the fear of foreign smells in the urban domain, or how odors define the ambiance of a space.

Among the contributors you'll find several authors we've discussed previously on these pages. There's an interesting article by Mandy Aftel on technical aspects of perfumery…

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Emotional responses to smell: recent research

Posted by Robin on 21 November 2006 2 Comments

“The Quest to Bottle Happiness” in today’s Orlando Sentinel details recent research into how we react emotionally to different smells:

For years, sensory scientists had assumed that our reactions to smell were hopelessly entwined with our cultural background. “When I came to the United Kingdom, I was shocked that the smell of chrysanthemums evokes romantic feelings in people here,” says Phillipe Durand, a perfumer at fragrance development company Quest International in Ashford, Kent, England. “In France, we associate it with graves and death.”

However, there is mounting evidence from brain scans that our responses to some smells, particularly bad ones, are innate…

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Perfume books ~ The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination by Alain Corbin

Posted by Marcello on 24 March 2006 9 Comments

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination by Alain Corbin The last two books we’ve discussed (Classen’s Aroma and Süskind’s Perfume) give a good impression of the malodors that infested the streets of 18th century Paris, and of the negative connotations attributed to smell since the Enlightenment. Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant fits well in this context, as it explores the relation between odors and hygiene in 18th and 19th century France. It traces back the social history of smell, particularly in the French capital, with the aim to better understand the “deodorized” world in which we live today.

Ever wondered how we ended up being so intolerant towards stench and body odor? You may think the answer lies in the invention of modern hygiene and deodorants, but according to French historian Alain Corbin, things are not that simple. Indeed, we sometimes forget just how radically science has changed our outlook on Nature in the past centuries; what looks obvious to us, may have been inconceivable to our ancestors. The Ancient Greek’s assumption that air, fire, water, and earth are the primordial elements of life serves as a small reminder: it wasn’t until the second half of the 18th century that Empedocles’ ideas were debunked by empirical science (think of Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, John Dalton, Amedeo Avogadro).

Taking this into account, it’s hardly surprising to see how the concept of “bad air” meant something very different to people in 1750 than it does nowadays…

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The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs by David S Barnes ~ perfume books

Concepts of Cleanliness by Georges Vigarello ~ perfume books

The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick ~ perfume book review

Emotional responses to smell: recent research

Perfume books ~ The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination by Alain Corbin