In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows ...how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.
On 9 June 1902, a fire at the General Electric Company offices in Queen Victoria Street led to the deaths of ten employees, including nine young women aged between 14 and 18. A coroner's inquest was ...immediately organized to ascertain the cause of death and a number of witnesses were called to give evidence. This article explores the evidence gathered at the inquest, focusing on the testimony of four witnesses: the spectator, employee, survivor and fireman. Their testimony exposed defects in the company's attitude towards fire safety, London's building bye-laws and the capital's fire protection. It subsequently weighs this evidence against other accounts of the fire as featured in newspapers and other contemporary texts. Our conclusions reveal significant variations between the coroner's verdict and the media's analysis of the fire, with particular focus given to accounts that sought to identify and hold to account those who were deemed publicly responsible for the failings to rescue the victims.
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