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

While readers of this journal are no doubt familiar with Edwin Chadwick's famous dictum that "all smell is disease," Melanie A. Kiechle's excellent new monograph offers an important reminder that nineteenth-century Americans feared miasmatic stenches as much as, if not more than, the filth that histories of public health in this period often focus on. Smell Detectives dramatically expands our understanding of how Americans shaped their daily lives and urban environments in order to control the health risks associated with foul odors. Blending medical, environmental, urban, and sensory history, Kiechle examines how city residents used their noses to monitor their surroundings and employed a variety of practices to avoid, reshape, and improve fetid urban smellscapes.

Kiechle combines a broad range of sources to show that smell was a form of "common sense" used by a wide array of urbanites—not only physicians, but also "health reformers, housekeepers, chemists, businessmen, tenement dwellers, and city alderman"—to register bodily discomfort and the presence of industrial nuisances in nineteenth-century America (6). She argues that olfactory concerns became particularly acute following the American Civil War, which disseminated the stench of industry and death on a new scale and convinced many of the need for greater governmental involvement in public health. However, as permanent boards of health granted physicians, chemists, and bacteriologists greater political power and professional respect, and germ theory's focus on specific etiological agents undermined the perceived link between stench and disease, common sense and expert understandings of the link between foul smells and ill health diverged. Boards of health demanded visual and laboratory evidence of nuisances to corroborate citizen reports of foul odors, eventually delegitimizing the very olfactory complaints that had led to demands for such boards in the first place.

The first three chapters examine the variety of "smell detectives" in antebellum America and the practices they used to individually navigate, avoid, and control urban smells. Chapter one, "The Smell of Sick Cities," follows the efforts of sanitary reformers like the New York physician John Griscom, who used sanitary surveys to record urban smells and called for solutions ranging from regulating nuisances to constructing public parks to provide fresh air. Chapter two, "Navigating by Nose," considers individual city dwellers' practical attempts to exercise control over their olfactory environments. These included the use of accessories such as nosegays, handkerchiefs, and cigars; new chemical products such as disinfectants and respirators; as well as seeking temporary respite from noxious smells in the country—or permanent respite in the suburbs. Chapter three, "Smells like Home," draws on household manuals by Catharine Beecher and others to examine the range of practices that women employed to prevent offensive smells from entering the home. By attending to ventilation and disinfection, deploying plants and window boxes as sweet-smelling buffers, and deodorizing wastewater plumbing, women waged "olfactory warfare" on foul odors (81). Kiechle shows that the spatial and decorative practices that came to define middle-class homes were shaped as much by attempts to control unhealthy smells as by aesthetic preferences.

The following two chapters consider how the industrial and corporeal stenches of the Civil War rendered individualized responses to urban smells insufficient. Chapter four, "The Stenches of Civil War," shows how the sheer scale of death—and its attendant stench—familiarized many Americans with disinfection practices and convinced them to give physicians greater political power to regulate nuisances. Chapter five, "Smelling Committees and Authority over City Air," examines nascent efforts by boards of health in New York and Chicago to police nuisance trades after the war. Kiechle shows that chemists had varying success in claiming the scientific and political authority to identify the source of foul odors and that city authorities remained more responsive to their own personal experience and complaints from "the public nose" than to scientists' professional expertise (139).

The final three...