Physicians of the last generation used to speak of typhus fever as having a close, mawkish odour, and the smell of smallpox is horrible. But these, as well as the appalling stench of the hospitals in olden days, are among the smells which have, for the most part, fled our country.
There are others, however, less powerful and repugnant, which are still with us, and which we recognise as among the prominent characteristics of certain maladies, the acid smell of acute rheumatism for one, and I have sometimes thought I could detect a characteristic odour also in acute nephritis, a smell resembling that of chaff. The odour of a big hæmorrhage is unmistakable and, to obstetricians particularly, ominous.
Then there is the smell of mice which attends upon the skin disease known as favus.
The breath of a chronic drunkard is familiar enough to everybody, and the more delicate aroma in the circumambient atmosphere of the careful tippler, ethereal and by no means unpleasant, will often reveal to the physician the hidden cause of obscure symptoms. It is particularly valuable when your patient is, as so many of these secret drinkers are, a woman, it may be a woman of good social standing.
A disease-odour of great value and significance is the sweet-smelling breath caused by acetone poisoning in the later stages of diabetes.
A sweet smell is also said by Bacon to attend plague:
“The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath the scent of a smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague, as white lilies, cowslips and hyacynth.” (Quoted by Creighton, “A History of British Epidemics,” p. 685, f.n.)
Death sometimes heralds his approach by means of an odour, said in some parts of the country to bring ravens about the house, which may well be true, as it is apparently a summons of the same nature that calls the Indian vulture in flocks from apparently untenanted skies. Birds in general, however, seem to belong to the microsmatic group of animals, relying chiefly upon their vision, which is often highly perfected, particularly for distance.
Much has been made, too much perhaps, of the part played by olfaction in the sex-life, and its undoubted prominence in the coupling of four-footed animals is pointed to as an indication of its potency in mankind also. But the reasoning is fallacious. Olfactory influences predominate in these animals simply because olfaction is their principal sense.
Among birds, now, courtship and marriage are conducted without any apparent aid from olfaction, and in no group of beings, not even in mankind, is the poetic side of courtship, both before and after marriage, so highly developed and so beautifully displayed. In their love-making the birds appeal to each other through the ear in their songs, and through the eye in the nuptial splendours of the male, splendours which he parades with glorious pomp before what often seems to be, indeed, but a lackadaisical and indifferent spouse.