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Smell Detectives
- An Olfactory History of 19th-Century Urban America (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
- Narrated by: Dana Brewer Harris
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
What did 19th-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the 19th-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that 19th-century city dwellers, anxious about the air they breathed, attempted to create healthier cities by detecting and then mitigating the most menacing odors.
Medical theories in the 19th century assumed that foul odors caused disease and that overcrowded cities, filled with new and stronger stinks, were synonymous with disease and danger. But the sources of offending odors proved difficult to pinpoint. The creation of city health boards introduced new conflicts between complaining citizens and the officials in charge of the air. Smell Detectives looks at the relationship between the construction of scientific expertise, on the one hand, and "common sense" - the olfactory experiences of common people - on the other. Although the rise of germ theory revolutionized medical knowledge and ultimately undid this form of sensory knowing, Smell Detectives recovers how city residents used their sense of smell and their health concerns about foul odors to understand, adjust to, and fight against urban environmental changes.
The book is published by University of Washington Press.
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We prefer not to talk about it, but we should. Disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, nearly two million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable. Moving from the underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York (an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen) to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, The Big Necessity breaks the silence, revealing everything that matters about how people do - and don't - deal with their own waste.
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Utterly fascinating
- By Clayton on 03-31-19
By: Rose George
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The Fever
- Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
- By: Sonia Shah
- Narrated by: Maha Chehlaoui
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names - and opened their pocketbooks - in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?
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Solid but not amazing account of malaria
- By S. Yates on 04-11-16
By: Sonia Shah
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The Remedy
- Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
- By: Thomas Goetz
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB - often called consumption - was a death sentence. Then, in a triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deployed an unprecedented scientific rigor to discover the bacteria that caused TB. Koch soon embarked on a remedy - a remedy that would be his undoing. When Koch announced his cure for consumption, Arthur Conan Doyle, then a small-town doctor in England and sometime writer, went to Berlin to cover the event.
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thought-provoking
- By Jean on 07-06-14
By: Thomas Goetz
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The Famine Plot
- England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy
- By: Tim Pat Coogan
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles the dark history of the Irish Famine and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide. In what the Boston Globe calls "his greatest achievement", Coogan shows how the British government hid behind the smoke screen of laissez faire economics, the invocation of divine providence, and a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, allowing more than a million people to die agonizing deaths and driving a further million into emigration.
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Atrocities abound.
- By GMJ on 06-05-18
By: Tim Pat Coogan
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The American Plague
- The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.
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Yellow Fever in Memphis
- By Kevin P Key on 04-13-20
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Coal
- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
- By: Mark Fiege
- Narrated by: William Bahl
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light.
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Will surely listen to it many times over.
- By Thomas Lopez on 01-24-20
By: Mark Fiege
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The Pandemic Century
- One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris
- By: Mark Honigsbaum
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.
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Pretty good
- By Baz 12345 on 04-03-20
By: Mark Honigsbaum
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Black Death at the Golden Gate
- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague
- By: David K. Randall
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide.
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Plague, Racism, Public Health..a toxic mix.
- By Steve Adams on 07-11-19
By: David K. Randall
What listeners say about Smell Detectives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-21-21
A Bit Dry
The reader's performance was dry and robotic, like she was reading a manual. The information was interesting, too bad the presentation wasn't.
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- Roger
- 04-05-18
Fresh Approach to Cultural History
Kiechle quite rightly proclaims that she is helping to pioneer a new branch of history: sensory history. Sensory history focuses on how stimuli affect people’s senses. It is a form of cultural history, in that it explores the everyday influences on the lives of ordinary people and their responses to those stimuli. In the process, sensory history helps us understand better the culture and environment of the period studied.
Kiechle has started with the most difficult sense to study—that of smell. By their nature, most smells are evanescent, and everyday smells tend not to be mentioned or recorded. Even unpleasant smells, unless they become extreme, are rarely discussed.
Kiechle also points out that we have fewer words to describe smells than we do for our other sensory perceptions. In addition, smells are very difficult to measure and almost impossible to preserve. Therefore, to detect and track down a bad smell, time is of the essence. Public involvement is required at the time and in the vicinity of the smell.
For a historian to track down smells from two centuries past is a daunting job. Kiechle, however, has done a great job researching how and what people smelled and how they reacted to those smells. She has used sources such as official complaints, letters to the editor and court records to reveal the general, public reaction to stenches—what, at the time, was men’s domain. She has also ingeniously used depictions of everyday life in novels and home advice manuals to illustrate how women coped with smells in the home.
At the start of the period covered by the book, the prevailing wisdom, called miasma theory, was that foul odors actually caused diseases. Therefore, smells could be more than annoyances; they could be life-threatening. People responded to these smells by wearing nosegays or smoking cigars to try to mask the odors and by building parks and using ventilation to try to clean the air.
The Civil War, with its stenches of both battlefields and military encampments, brought urban smells to masses of people not previously exposed to them. This exposure, combined with the intensity of the smells, helped bring discussion of the dangers of smells, and the means to mitigate them, more into the open.
After the Civil War, rapid industrialization brought new and stronger smells, as well as the concentration of foul odors in industrial neighborhoods. Dealing with these new threats elicited the efforts of experts, and these experts struggled to get the authority to regulate smell producers.
The last half of the 19th century also saw the general acceptance of germ theory—that diseases are caused by microbes, not smells. That acceptance accelerated the importance of experts, and it also led to smells being more of a social, rather than a health, concern. Given improvements in transportation, the upper and middle classes were able to move away from smell producers and still commute to work. The neighborhoods around the industrial production of foul odors were left to the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. Kiechle calls this smell segregation.
The increasing importance of experts diminished everyday public involvement in combatting odors, a trend that Kiechle decries. While experts may be needed to identify the specifics of smells, on-the-spot sensing of odors is just as vital today as it was in the 18th century.
Therefore, cooperation between the public and the experts, rather than antagonism, is needed. Lack of public involvement can lead to odors being missed. Lack of respect for expertise can lead to science deniers, a phenomenon all too common these days.
Kiechle has done an admirable job both in breaking new ground in the study of history and in explaining the everyday worlds of the 19th century, much of which still pertains today.
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