Smell Detectives

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-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 nineteenth-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 nineteenth 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.

Smell Detectives is a brilliant, entertaining book informed by careful archival research. Supplemented by fascinating illustrations, the book navigates a rich and eclectic archive that is frequently obscured when historians overemphasize the perspectives of health experts and government officials. . . . Kiechle's remarkable study opens up productive new questions and lines of inquiry., Kiechle’s addition to sensory history provides many points to discuss about the people who made the smells that they did not like., This book is a highly creative and unusual glimpse into a realm of environmental history that is rarely accessible to modern observers., An attractive edition . . . beautifully written, with a flair for the attention-grabbing turn of phrase that is compulsory in sensory studies. The work is also finely illustrated, offering prints from the nineteenth century that are at no occasion superfluous. As environmental history, Smell Detectives is an essential read, offering new contexts for a field in search of freshly radical tones to combat environmental degradation.

Melanie A. Kiechle is assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech.