What Does History Smell Like?

I've been to rural areas in North Africa, India, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America. One uniquitous and unexpected smell is that of smoke. The majority of cooking in these rural areas is over fire, and burning garbage is a commonplace activity; people will burn their household garbage in their back yards. That and the smell of food cooking (usually outdoors) are the most prevalent scents. In low- or moderate-population areas, it's actually a pleasant smell, and the lack of other pollution leaves the air fresh, with smoke wafting by occasionally. Notably, there's no sewage smell in most of these places, even when there's no plumbing.

Cities in these places, on the other hand, can have overwhelming scents. In addition to all the smoke from the same activities above, some of the large cities (particularly in Asia) have open sewers in the street, and standing bodies of water with algae overgrowth. I imagine this is roughly what large cities over the millenia have smelled like.

Now there are two major pollutants in the mix as well: cars (with no pollution standards in place) and industrial manufacturing. Of the places I've been, this is most prevalent in large cities in India and Thailand.

> medical texts maintained that odors could directly affect those who inhaled them

That didn't just cause people to be fussy about smells. It caused them, for hundreds of years, to ignore evidence for the actual mechanism of disease transmission. The well-known story about the Broad St cholera outbreak, where someone figured out (in 1854) that cholera was caused by tainted drinking water, didn't have a happy ending as the "miasma" (odors) theory prevailed with public health officials and millions more died.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

There's an interesting discussion about the variety of smells which the article goes into, but there were also recurring smells across multiple epochs.

I've spent some time thinking about historical smells. My money says a huge hunk of history smelled like the back end of a horse.

I remember reading somewhere twenty years ago that the past smelled aweful. People not bathing, poor sanitation, sewage, industrial pollution, fires for cooking or heat, I wish I had even a hint of where to find that article because it was pretty vivid. The closest I think I’ve ever come to that level of supposed stench would be New York City in the summer time when it’s 90-+100 degrees and +70% humidity. You can’t walk a block with out being soaked in sweat and everyone is soaked in sweat! Combined with the raw garbage, ands feces and it makes for a great democratizer and some interesting scenes.