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.

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience and philosophical inquiry depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars have become increasingly interested in how medicine and theories of matter shaped the development of art criticism and philosophical aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that changing ideas about the body's involuntary functions - along with their pathologies and therapies - had a crucial role in the development of aesthetics and art theory in Britain during the first half of the 18th century. Drawing on a wide range of sources concerning the imperceptible motions of plant and animal bodies, I show how debates about the the body's involuntary responses to the world outside it shaped claims about what we now call aesthetic experience - the experience of beauty and sublimity. This paper will do more than simply show that art theorists such as Jonathan Richardson and William Hogarth responded to philosophical and medical attempts to describe and control the body’s involuntary motions. Rather, it will seek to demonstrate that a concern about involuntary motion was a central theme in 18th century thought, animating a range of interconnected discourses and practices concerned with the mind's non-cognitive or affective responses to sensory experience. Those ranged from debates about the how invisible attractive forces shaped the temperaments to questions about the forms of experience arising from mysterious, involuntary vibrations taking place inside the body.

In the late nineteenth century, questions regarding hygiene and public health became central to the medical, cultural and political debates in Italy. Particularly during the first few decades after the unification (1861), public health campaigns became a key element in the creation of the new kingdom. One of the key figures who contributed to the establishment of the practice of hygiene in the country was the polymath Paolo Mantegazza. Mantegazza introduced the culture of hygiene in a variety of ways: from laboratory and hospital practice to the creation of sexual medicine. The Italian polymath published widely on sexual medicine for both the professional and general audience with controversial books such as Physiology of Love (1873), The Sexual Relationship of Mankind (1886) and The Art of Taking a Wife (1894). The aim of this paper is to look specifically at his physiological work on sexuality, showing how the control and management of any sexual desires became key to the welfare of the new kingdom. This paper will also look at how the author communicated his controversial ideas about sex and its practices to the general public. This will provide an overview of the circulation of controversial medical knowledge in the post-unification Italian context and the importance this had for national public health.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the medical gaze turned itself upon the child and the adolescent, promoted them as new objects of science. In both Scotland and France, an alliance between political and medical men was formed to deal with their respective demographic crisis: public health, hygiene, as well as personal behaviours were targeted to improve child health. Both nations developed similar anxieties and fears over their population growth, and addressed these challenges in a similar way - through the introduction of pieces of legislations as well as formulating social and medical precepts promoting child welfare. Yet, some crucial differences in their implementation emphasise distinct approaches to the medicalisation of childhood and adolescence, which would ultimately bear consequence to the ‘alienisation’ of both periods of life. This paper addresses the question of child and adolescent development and its interpretation within psychiatric discourses in both France and Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will stress out how paediatrics became a separate field of study in both countries, signing off different perspectives to the question of the young body in health and sickness. This will allow us to understand how the medicalisation of childhood and adolescence, under the influence of evolutionary psychology and pedagogy, concurred to form different discursive traditions on mental abnormality in young people. In other words, this paper will show how the emergence of child and adolescent psychiatry sits at the crossroads of competing, yet complementing, medical, psychological, social and educationist discourses.