Читать книгу Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells онлайн

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“But what,” I remember asking the mother of our party—“what is meant by ‘peace of mind’?” Her wistful smile seemed to me to be a very inadequate reply to my question—which, by the way, I am still asking.

It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its inhabitants.

The reason assigned by the man in the street for this reform was, and indeed still is, that stenches breed epidemic diseases. In a noisome smell people imagine a deadly pestilence, probably because patients affected with such epidemic diseases as smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria, give off nauseating odours. Now, bad smells from drains and cesspools do not of themselves induce epidemic disease. Nevertheless, there is this much of truth in the superstition, that where you have bad smells you have also surface accumulations of filth, and these, soaking through soil and subsoil, contaminate surface wells, until it only requires the advent of a typhoid or other “carrier” to set a widespread epidemic a-going. Further, as recent investigators have shown us, the loathsome and deadly typhus fever, known for years to be a “filth-disease,” is carried by lice, which pests breed and flourish where bodily cleanliness is neglected and personal odours are strong.