By Mark Bradley
From plants and perfumes to city sanitation and private hygiene, smell―a experience that's concurrently elegant and animalistic―has performed a pivotal position in western tradition and idea. Greek and Roman writers and thinkers misplaced no chance to attach the smells that bombarded their senses to the social, political and cultural prestige of the members and environments that they encountered: godly incense and burning sacrifices, seductive scents, fragrant cuisines, stinking our bodies, smelly farmyards and festering back-streets.
The cultural research of scent has mostly curious about pollutants, transgression and propriety, however the olfactory feel got here into play in quite a lot of domain names and actions: historic drugs and philosophy, faith, botany and typical heritage, erotic literature, city making plans, eating, satire and comedy―where odours, aromas, scents and stenches have been wealthy and flexible elements of the traditional sensorium. the 1st complete creation to the position of scent within the historical past, literature and society of classical antiquity, Smell and the traditional Senses explores and probes the ways in which the olfactory experience can give a contribution to our perceptions of historical lifestyles, behaviour, id and morality.
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According to Galen, this was due to the size of taste and smell particles: the former, being larger than the latter, stimulated sensation better. 51 The vocabulary relating to odours (of bodily fluids and materia medica) in the ancient medical corpus is indeed very poor. 52 Medical writers therefore followed Plato in his assertion that there are only two types of smell: pleasant and unpleasant (Timaeus 67e, see Baltussen p. 32 in this volume); as later chapters in this volume demonstrate, this dichotomy appears to have been pervasive in a range of domains across Greco-Roman antiquity.
2, p. 628 Kühn). The Timaeus passage is at 66e. 19 See Eastwood (1981) for a discussion of Galen’s vaporous smell with references. On Aristotle and the sense of smell, see Johansen (1996). On Galen’s criticism of the Aristotelian theory of smell, see van der Eijk (2010). 214 Kühn). See Siegel (1970: 156–57). 1, p. 2, p. 245–46 Olivieri). 21 Anomymus Medicus Parisinus, De morbis acutis et chroniis 22 (130–32 Garofalo) = Diocles fr. 83 (van der Eijk). 20 SMELL AS SIGN AND CURE IN ANCIENT MEDICINE they [sc.
64 One area of treatment in which smells played a particularly important role is that of the womb. Indeed, some medical authorities believed this organ had the ability to move in the female body (along the “tube” described above), thus causing suffocation and other ailments. Fortunately, the displaced womb would respond to smell: it was repelled by stenches and attracted to pleasant scents; applications of smelling substances to both ends of the tube would help the womb move back to its usual location.