Being a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz

Author:Alexandra Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

-PERSON-

Dogs’ capacities at cancer detection are, to my thinking, the perfect example of what seems most mysterious about the dog nose. Cancer is not only something we fear or dread; it is something opaque to the mind and often invisible to the eye—certainly not smellable. To the dog, freed of our conceptions of mortality and our obsession with sight, cancer is just a smell.

On the other hand, a bit of our own, mostly neglected history is relevant here. It is this: humans have been diagnosing disease by smell for thousands of years. Only in recent times have we essentially stopped smelling.

So here I must go back in time. We have grown so antiseptic, so machine-addled, that we no longer bother to sniff (or, sometimes, look at) patients. This has not always been so. Ancient thinkers and cultures were aware of the role of smell in disease. Smelling one’s patient and his diseases goes back at least to Hippocrates, who advised doctors to keep an “open nose.” The ancient Greeks thought about smell as symptomatic: to Plato, smell arose in transformation between two elements: “As water changes to air, and air to water, all odours have arisen in between.” The physician Galen characterized smells on people, from their mouths, as either “according to nature” or “against nature.”

The interest in smells led to some bizarre ancient medical treatments. The belief that a pregnant woman’s uterus could travel up to her throat and suffocate her led physicians to wave horrible-smelling material near the woman’s mouth (to send the womb away), and pleasant-smelling stuff around her genitals (to draw it near). Pliny noted that the “rank” smell of the armpit was thought to be addressable by drinking a white Falernian wine—and then urinating out the smell. Whether this method replaced the smell with a smell of wine, or merely made the drinker sufficiently besotted that he did not notice his smell, is unknown. Other recipes involved chewing gum; perfumes, too, were thought to be health-giving.

Linnaeus’s original eighteenth-century classification of the fundamental kinds of scents was actually medically inspired: he was interested in botanical smells and the curative (or ill) effect they would impart on their consumer. While a “fragrant” plant (lime, lily) might be healthful, “repulsive” or “nauseating”-smelling plants—such as veratrum, highly toxic—were clearly to be avoided. Plants with no odor at all were no good.

Despite Hippocrates’ “open nose,” the fear that bad odors themselves caused disease loomed large. Galen warned people to avoid “those who exhale such putrid humours that the houses in which they lie in bed become stinky.” Given Hippocrates’ continued influence in modern medicine, perhaps the contemporary worry that some still hold that foul odors breed contagious illness is not surprising. One helpful sixteenth-century instructional manual for doctors suggested readying oneself when approaching an ill-smelling patient with a fragrant branch of burning juniper and speaking to the patient “from a certain distance away.” If one must approach, it suggested, venture forth with back turned, and take the patient’s pulse by

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.