Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America by Melanie A. Kiechle

Author:Melanie A. Kiechle [Kiechle, Melanie A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295741949
Google: 8HEpDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0295741937
Published: 2017-08-22T07:15:15+00:00

SIX

LEARNING TO SMELL AGAIN

Managing the Air between the Civil War and Germ Theory

IN SEPTEMBER 1873, THE SANITARIAN, A NEW MONTHLY JOURNAL dedicated to sanitary science and reform, mailed its sixth issue to subscribers. Nestled between articles that explained the appropriate methods of sea bathing and how to prevent cholera appeared a short paragraph titled simply “Disinfectants.” Without comment or elaboration, the paragraph quoted a student’s response to an exam asking how disinfectants worked: “They smell so badly that the people open the windows, and fresh air gets in.”1

The editors probably included this piece for some humorous relief from the long and serious articles about how to preserve and improve public health. One can easily imagine the bemused teacher smiling and shaking his head at the clever answer. However, readers of the Sanitarian recognized that the student, while evading the spirit of the question, was correct. The student’s answer emphasized the paradox of disinfectants—they worked, but the powerful odors of chemical disinfectants required open windows and thus ushered fresh air, one of nature’s disinfectants, into the room.

The student stood between two worlds that were quickly diverging after the Civil War, as new scientific knowledge disrupted the logic behind traditional practices. Journals such as the Sanitarian and Herald of Health tried to bridge these worlds by appealing to both medical and lay audiences, applying the most recent theories and discoveries of the laboratory to the lived spaces of city and home. The journals attracted interested lay readers who, like the student, blended long-standing practices of opening windows, positioning fragrant plants, and airing rooms with newer applications of chemical disinfectants to kill disease agents and ensure health through access to “fresh air,” an old friend whose definition was changing.

In their discussions of and practices for ensuring health in urban spaces, Americans began questioning miasma theory before germ theory was widely introduced, understood, or accepted. The experiments of chemist Louis Pasteur in France and physician Robert Koch in Germany increasingly proved that microbes caused the era’s deadliest diseases in the 1860s and 1870s, but the discovery of germs neither occurred overnight nor immediately changed ideas about health and illness. Instead of thinking of the turn from miasma to germ theory as a watershed moment that revolutionized medical practice and popular ideas about health, we might better see it as a turning of the tide. While the introduction of germ theory created a dramatic change overall, the transformation of beliefs and practices occurred in ebbs and flows spread across a variety of spaces and left behind scattered pools of unchanged thoughts. Decisions made in the home and discoveries made in the lab might have occurred in the same decades and in the same cultural context, but they did not necessarily happen for the same reasons.2

Women participated in conversations about disease etiology, sanitary science, and healthful environs. As they had been in antebellum homes, women were on the front lines of health preservation and disease prevention, and they guarded their families’ health both with methods proven

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