Smell and the Ancient Senses

Mark Bradley, Mark Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317565819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

From flowers and perfumes to urban sanitation and personal hygiene, smell—a sense that is simultaneously sublime and animalistic—has played a pivotal role in western culture and thought. Greek and Roman writers and thinkers lost no opportunity to connect the smells that bombarded their senses to the social, political and cultural status of the individuals and environments that they encountered: godly incense and burning sacrifices, seductive scents, aromatic cuisines, stinking bodies, pungent farmyards and festering back-streets.

The cultural study of smell has largely focused on pollution, transgression and propriety, but the olfactory sense came into play in a wide range of domains and activities: ancient medicine and philosophy, religion, botany and natural history, erotic literature, urban planning, dining, satire and comedy—where odours, aromas, scents and stenches were rich and versatile components of the ancient sensorium. The first comprehensive introduction to the role of smell in the history, literature and society of classical antiquity, Smell and the Ancient Senses explores and probes the ways that the olfactory sense can contribute to our perceptions of ancient life, behaviour, identity and morality.

1

SMELL AS SIGN AND CURE IN ANCIENT MEDICINE

Laurence Totelin¹

Introduction

Pleasure and pain are inherent in all senses, but clearly not in equal proportions: it is least in that of sight; most in that of touch and taste; and next to these, in smell; and after these in hearing.²

Galen (129–218 CE), the prolific physician from Pergamum, ranked smell third in his classification of the senses.³ In a medical context, with its various uses and meanings, smell brought pleasure and displeasure in the same degree. On the one hand, sweet scents made medicaments more pleasant; smelling substances (both sweet-scented and fetid) could bring healing; and offensive bodily odours could help detect illnesses. On the other hand, bad smells, such as those of coals that have gone out, could cause suffocation;⁴ and they could even cause diseases, as suggested by the author of the Hippocratic treatise Affections:

Bile and phlegm produce diseases when, in the body, one of them becomes too wet, too dry, too hot or too cold. Phlegm and bile change in these ways from foods and drinks, from toils and wounds, from smell (ἀπò ὀσμῆς) and sexual intercourse, and from heat and cold.⁵

Smells, alongside other factors, could disrupt the delicate balance of humours in the body, thus bringing diseases.⁶ They could also cause a pestilence, if we interpret references to miasmata in the Hippocratic Corpus, such as the following, as allusions to fetid rising smell:

When the air is full of miasmata, which are hostile to human nature, this is when men become ill.⁷

Galen too on occasions gives smells as a cause of disease: “it is dangerous to spend one’s day with those afflicted with phthisis, and generally those who exhale such putrid humours that the houses in which they lie in bed become stinky (δνσώδειϛ)”, thus hinting at some process of contagion.⁸

This chapter considers the roles and functions of smell in ancient medicine, examining material from the Hippocratic Corpus (a collection of texts, composed for the most part to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE) through to Celsus (Aulus Aurelius Celsus, beginning of the first century CE), Dioscorides of Anazarbus (first century CE) and Galen. Like the philosophers, medical authors (who often considered themselves philosophers) puzzled over the sense of smell, which was so difficult to locate in a specific part of the body, and over the ineffability of smells, easily perceived but impossible to describe. Here, I will first examine theories of smelling expounded in medical writing, in particular in Galen’s On the Organ of Smell. ⁹ I will then turn to ancient medical approaches to ailments affecting individuals’ capacity to detect and discriminate smells in the environment, from the simple headache to more complex “smell paralyses”. I will then study the role of the olfactory sense in medical epistemology, that is, the interpretation of smells (of stools, urine, spit, sweat and so on) in the prognostic and diagnostic of particular states of health and disease: the use of smell as markers of imbalances in bodily humours. Finally, I will describe the use of medical therapies employing smell – pleasant or repelling – to cure ailments, in particular those of the womb.

Theories of smelling and diseases affecting smell

There was some debate among ancient medical writers as to the organ of smell, that is, the organ with the sensory capacity for perceiving smell. Was it the nose or was it the brain? According to the author of the Hippocratic treatise Flesh, the brain was that organ: it spread as far as the nasal cavities, being separated from the nose only by a “soft cartilage, similar to a sponge, neither flesh nor bone” (called in later antiquity “ethmoid bone”). By virtue of being wet, the brain perceives dry smells through dry tubes (this is the principle whereby opposites attract opposites, contraria contrariis). The drier the nasal cavities are, the better the perception of dry smells, and vice versa. And since the brain is not as wet as water, it cannot distinguish the smell of water, unless it is putrid.¹⁰

Another Hippocratic author, that of Places in Man, appears to imply that the brain is involved in smelling. For he argued that, whereas there is a perforation through the membrane enclosing the brain in the cases of the ears,

at the nostrils there is no such opening but a soft area, like sponges. For this reason we hear over a greater distance than we smell. For an odour is dispersed far from the sense of smell [translation: Craik].¹¹

The author may here have attempted to explain in anatomical terms why humans have a weak sense of smell compared to other animals, a fact stated explicitly by the philosopher Theophrastus (c. 340–287/6 BCE) in his text On Odours (on philosophers and the sense of smell, see Baltussen in this volume).¹²

These Hippocratic theories recall that of the Presocratic philosopher Alcmaeon (fifth century BCE), who, according to Theophrastus, suggested that “smelling occurs by drawing in the breath (pneuma) to the brain through the nostrils at the same time as breathing”.¹³ As shown by Geoffrey Lloyd (1975: 122), such theories did not require the use of dissection (which was not practised in the classical period), as a probe would have been sufficient to come into contact with the ethmoid bone.¹⁴ Better anatomical knowledge gained through dissection in Hellenistic Alexandria, however, did not lead to unified theories of smelling among medical authors. Thus, on the one hand, Celsus considered nasal passages to be responsible for olfaction (On Medicine 8.1.5–6, discussed in Introduction, p. 3). Galen, on the other hand, and of his own admission against the opinion of the majority (including Aristotle), located the organ of smell in the brain, even though inhalation through the nose is necessary for the perception of odours.¹⁵ It is through experiments, described in the short text The Organ of Smell, that he had reached that – surprising – conclusion. He had prescribed to a man who had lost his sense of olfaction through coriza to fill his mouth with water and his nostrils with the spice nigella (Nigella sativa L., also known as black cumin), and to inhale strongly.¹⁶ On the fourth day of that treatment, upon inhaling more strongly than usual, the man felt a sharp pain in the head, whence Galen inferred that some of the nigella has been carried into the cavities of the brain. He went on to repeat the experiment on numerous slaves, concluding that “the sense of smell arises in the ventricles of the brain” that “sit next to the choroid plexuses”. He found validation of this theory in the fact that the brain, like smell, was vaporous: “The necessity for the organ of smell itself to be somehow vaporous appears to agree with these conclusions”.¹⁷ Indeed, for Galen, who followed Plato in this matter, each sense was associated with an element, and each sense organ by necessity resembled that element. However, since there were only four elements (air, water, fire, earth), one of the senses – smell – had to be intermediate between two elements, namely air and water:

[Smell] is a fifth sense faculty, even though there are not five elements, since the category of smells is in nature intermediate between air and water, as Plato said in this passage of the Timaeus: “as water changes to air, and air to water, all odours have arisen in between”.¹⁸

Galen’s conception of smell was, however, more complex than that of Plato, and incorporated some elements of Aristotelian philosophy. Rather than being simple vapour (water-air), Galenic smell carried earthy and fiery properties.¹⁹

The Galenic brain, as organ of smell, was also responsible for damaged sense of olfaction: “Damaged sense of smell is an affliction that does not originate in the nasal passageways, but either from the anterior cavities of the brain leading to dyskrasia [that is, bad temperament], or from the blocked passages (τρήματα) in the ethmoid bones”.²⁰ On the other hand, older medical authorities (namely, Diocles, Erasistratus, Hippocrates and Praxagoras), according to the Anonymous author of Paris, had argued that a

paralysis of the sense of smell … is caused by an obstruction of the passages (νεύρων) leading to the nostrils due to phlegmatic humours, which prevents the power of smell from reaching the nostrils.

The Anonymous author classified this “paralysis of the smell” as a disease per se, with identifiable symptoms (inability to smell anything; dripping nose) and therapy (sneezing, hot fomentations and sharp injections in the nostrils).²¹ A damaged sense of smell, however, was most often regarded as a symptom of another disease. Thus, the compiler of the Hippocratic treatise Internal Afflictions noted how a “thick” disease made patients unable to stand the smell of earth, dust and particularly of wet soil after rain; and that of Diseases of Women wrote that, in a displacement of the womb to the hip-joint, “the nostrils become dry and blocked, and do not draw anything in. The breath is weak, and they [sc. the patients] smell nothing”.²² According to Aretaeus (dates difficult to establish, second century CE?), in epilepsy people could not endure heavy odours, such as that of lignite; and those who suffered from cephalea could bear neither pleasant nor fetid smells.²³ In general, Galen noted that duller and hazier hearing, smell and sight were the sign of an incipient disease.²⁴

With these considerations on a damaged sense of smell as symptom of an incipient or established disease, we have touched upon the role of smell as a prognostic and diagnostic tool. We now turn to this topic more fully.

Bodily odour; smell as symptom, prognostic and diagnostic

“In some people the smell of the entire body and mouth is by nature unpleasant, as in others it is irreproachable”; that wo/men could smell, even when healthy, was a recognized fact in antiquity.²⁵ Numerous cosmetics treatises (which have not been preserved) and medical works contained treatments to tackle bodily odours. For instance, the pharmacologist Scribonius Largus (writing under the emperor Claudius, first century CE) gives the formulae of toothpastes used by “Augusta”, Octavia (Augustus’ sister) and Messalina; Aetius (sixth century CE) preserves the recipe of a draught against bodily odour; and Pliny mentions the following deodorant, designed by the physician Xenocrates (first century BCE):

Rank smell from the armpits is corrected by one ounce of the root [of scolymum], without its marrow, in three heminae of Fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: smell and the ancient senses
• 1 Smell as sign and cure in ancient medicine
• 2 Ancient philosophers on the sense of smell
• 3 Divine scents and presence
• 4 Smelling trees, flowers and herbs in the ancient world
• 5 Making scents of poetry
• 6 Roman urban smells: the archaeological evidence
• 7 Urban smells and Roman noses
• 8 The scent of Roman dining
• 9 Foul bodies in ancient Rome
• 10 Fragrance in the rabbinic world
• 11 Smell and Christianity
• 12 Missing noses
• Bibliography
• Index