Pongs of praise: the history and importance of smell for our antisceptic age
From our UK edition
For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odours is a sign of progress. Civilisation doesn’t smell. Neither Bjorn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalised – Tullett uses the word ‘ephemeralised’ – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens.
