The Smell of the Sick: Odor in Eighteenth-Century French Medicine

Eighteenth-century France was marked by distinctly “odored” phenomena. The rise of industry led to the emission of mephitic aerial pollutants while disease outbreaks caused an overcrowding of hospitals, which became noxious institutions in many cities. These smelly realities and the anxieties that they provoked led to an increased attention to atmospheric aromas and personal bodily odors. While French cultural historians such as Alain Corbin (Le Miasme et la Jonquille, 1982) and Robert Muchembled (La Civilisation des Odeurs, 2017) have studied scent and smell during this period, the topic has been largely ignored by historians of science and medicine. This lacuna is striking, given that the medical literature from this period demonstrates a heightened concern with the importance of odor and odorants in medical practice. The use of odor in medicine participated in a medical epistemology that interfaced with contemporary theories and experiments on air quality and composition in relation to human health.In this paper, I explore the ways in which scent figured into medical thought, and the social ramifications of this development. My analysis centers on the relationship between odor and disease, focusing on (1) the role of odor in explaining the cause of diseases, (2) the importance of odor as a symptom in disease diagnosis, and (3) aromatic and olfactory treatments of diseases that were supported in the period. I conclude by showing how representations of odor helped to define what it meant to be healthy and normal in eighteenth-century France, in the medical realm and beyond.