The foul and the fragrant: what did the past smell like?

The Scientific Revolution introduced the now disproven but once widely accepted notion that illnesses spread through foul odours like those emanating from cesspools, garbage dumps, and animal carcasses.

Doctors advised their patients to avoid these odours — known as “miasmas” — like the plague, and they continued to do so until germ theory became more widely accepted in the later half of the 19th century.

Miasma theory affected nearly every part of civilization, from politics to the economy. Perfumes made from animal musk — common in Europe since the early Middle Ages — disappeared in favour of floral scents. Instead of sniffing their own latrines, people now covered their apartments with various sweet-smelling plants to block out noxious gases from the outside world.

• William Tullett, a history professor at Anglia Ruskin University, thinks modern media may have exaggerated the stench of past centuries.
• Our obsession with stench may be rooted in some contorted form of xenophobia.
• Recent global research suggests that the current literature on smell in history is not only too simplistic but also too Eurocentric.
• While particular smells demarcated certain social standings in pre-revolutionary France, the same standards did not apply to other countries.

• Romans treated their dead with perfumes, ointments, and incense while they lay in state.
• These fragrances combated the “pollution” inside the corpse.
• Perfuming the dead was so important to ancient Romans that it often took precedence over other social customs.