ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

In today's world, your doctor is likely to ask you how you feel when you vist. In the past, however, a doctor was more likely to ask himself how you smell - fragrant or foul?

In his presentation to the forthcoming IFRA UK Fragrance Forum at the Royal Society, Professor Jonathan Reinarz, a specialist in the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham, will reveal how much greater a role scent and the sense of smell played in assessing the health of people and environments in the past.

His talk ‘Detecting Disease - The Pathological World of Smell' will introduce industry professionals to his research on ‘past scents' and the historical use of olfaction in medicine.

Prof Reinarz says: "Histories of smell often offer a selection of foul and fragrant subjects and situate them within particular eras and a specific thematic field. Religion is one topic where such an approach has dominated, with good smells regularly associated with heaven and hagiographies, and bad smells effectively demarcating sin and Satan.

"This early sensory model was readily applied to the world of medicine and health, with good smells indicating health and healthy environments, and bad smells being closely associated with pestiferous regions."

So how else did physicians and surgeons use their sense of smell in the past?

Death was of course regularly accompanied by fetid odours and epidemics like plague were described by the stench of bodies accumulating in streets. Says Prof Reinarz: "Theories of disease causation based on the circulation of bad airs abounded from ancient times to the 19th century and the general way to counter such dangers was through fumigation, or using pleasant scents to neutralise any harmful stenches.

"So dominant was this model of health and hygiene that Edwin Chadwick's sanitary surveys of English towns appear to have been undertaken by a team of men who simply sniffed out all potential hazards in Victorian towns, cataloguing those areas most in need of cleansing." In this respect, he explains, the Victorian public health movement appears to have been little more than a massive exercise in urban cleaning.

He will address such questions as: ‘While such efforts did make for healthier environments, was smell always a reliable clue?' And ‘was this form of medicine value-free?'.

"As neighbourhoods and institutions became more sanitary, the likelihood of practitioners actually using their noses in a clinical setting actually increased," says Prof Reinarz. "Evidence of doctors diagnosing disease through scent, however, abounds in medical texts, ancient and modern. For example medieval doctors were very attentive to the smell of patients' breath and sweat. Diseases were also associated with distinctive smells. Plague was said to smell of apples, while typhus reputedly smelled of mice."

With the dawning of the age of bacteriology, when more reliable tests could be performed, smell was used less by diagnosticians.

Other senses, notably sight and hearing, were extended with the introduction of new instruments, while smell appears to have been forgotten as a diagnostic tool. Professor Reinarz wonders whether we will ever see similar efforts to augment smelling power.

He Reinarz points out that: "The rise of aromatherapy initially linked to the new bacteriological tradition, given the germicidal strength of the oils at the heart of this therapeutic practice. Simultaneously, it appears connected to an unbroken chain of practices which originated in ancient civilisations, as existed in Egypt."

He concludes: "The traditional views that have associated pleasant smells with health have been overturned in the last decades of the 20th century. Besides bans on smoking, increasing numbers of individuals and groups, citing allergic concerns, have tried to ban perfumes from public places. Are perfumes destined to go the same way as the peanut?"

The IFRA UK Fragrance Forum 2015 takes place on October 15 in London. For ticket prices visit: www.ifrauk.org or email secretariat@ifrauk.org