Senses Virtual Issue Introduction
Sensory History Comes of Age: Exploring the Senses in Social History of Medicine
Guest Edited by Jonathan Reinarz, University of Birmingham
This Virtual Issue of Social History of Medicine (SMH) is intended to coincide with the 30th anniversary conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine (EAHMH), the theme of which is ‘Sense and Nonsense’. I intend to highlight the sensory turn that has taken place in historiography more generally in recent years, but also challenge medical historians to explore the ways in which their work intersects with this topic. It is now just over thirty years since the publication in English of Alain Corbin’s Le miasme et la jonquille (1982) as The Foul and the Fragrant (1986). Mark Jenner's review for SHM recognised it as ‘provocative’ and ‘original’, predicting that it would become ‘standard reading’ for historians. However, it was also criticised for failing ‘to demonstrate broad shifts’ over time. The articles assembled in this Virtual Issue have been chosen specifically to cover the senses from medieval to modern times. Not all of these articles specifically engage with sensory history, let alone Corbin’s influential text. Had this been my criteria for selection, this would have been a very short issue. The selected articles that engage most directly with sensory history are those by Cavallo, Storm and Kennaway, but several others cover topics that have become central to this emerging field, or at least address an aspect of the senses in an important way. If there is a gap, it is the near absence of taste as it relates to food, which the morsel of Lloyd’s 2011 review essay does not quite fill.
If Corbin brought sensory history to historians across its many sub-disciplines, Bynum’s and Porter’s Medicine and the Five Senses (1993) encouraged medical historians to consider aspects of sensory perception as it related to diagnosis and treatment in the past. Their edited volume discussed the senses in Greek medicine through to the late-twentieth century. The book was reviewed in this journal far less enthusiastically than was Corbin’s ground-breaking work. While the reviewer of Corbin’s work claimed that a study of smell usefully challenged the ‘privileging the sense of sight’, the reviewer of Porter and Bynum’s volume was, quite tellingly, most impressed by the chapter that examined Renaissance medical illustrations. SHM did not initially engage with a field that was clearly wide open for exploration: few articles appear even to mention the senses throughout the 1990s, few key sensory history texts were reviewed in its pages, and when they were, reviews seemed to indicate that medical historians were still largely preoccupied with sight above all other senses. Ludmilla Jordanova’s review essay of 1990 was nevertheless a significant contribution, as was the appearance of her book, Defining Features, a decade later.
Faith Wallis’s article on pulse and urine inspection as described in early medieval texts in many respects follows the approach outlined in Medicine and the Five Senses, although it does not reference that work, or any other key work in sensory studies. Nevertheless, it invites us to consider the sensual ways in which the pulse was described in a handful of Italian medical anthologies; was it fluid, rapid, frequent, irregular? Alternatively, how did urine appear, smell or taste and what did this suggest about the state of the body’s digestive powers? As importantly, although we might know how the authors of such texts were trained, we will always struggle to understand the individual, craft-like phronesis, or hands-on knowledge that is hinted at in such writings (see also Orland's review of Stolberg in SHM 24). However, references to the position in which a patient was lying, their colour, voice, silences, all spoke volumes to practitioners. Another lesson that emerges from Wallis’s article is that sensations associated with the pulse and urine are not simply physical signs without associated semiotics. Senses have meaning, and not always ones we might immediately recognise. If we are to write convincingly about patients’ experiences historically, we must sometimes interpret evidence very differently. This Virtual Issue, then, might be read with these medieval texts in mind. As sense historian Mark Smith has commented, it is not so much about doing things differently, than perceiving things differently (Sensory History, 4-5). Evidence of the senses is everywhere in the texts that we have all trawled through before, only now we need to retune our own sensory habits to re-read them for evidence of scents, sounds, pains, tastes and sights.
Some of the first works of sensory history (including Corbin's) concentrated on unusual, if obvious, sensory episodes, such as The Great Stink of Paris in 1880 studied by David Barnes (2006). However, Corbin also explored the less pungent scents that permeated the decor of homes and were thought to have the potential to impact upon on the health of dwellers before they even became as obvious or distinct as the average tannery or manure heap. Sandra Cavallo’s 2016 article in this journal was a timely reminder that scholars had perhaps too easily presumed that medical definitions of unhealthy air remained unchanged for centuries. Like a patient’s pulse or urine, air acquired a physicality that was ‘experienced by all the senses’. Through an examination of early modern Italian domestic interiors, Cavallo also demonstrates that consumers’ choices about home design and furnishings were about controlling the bad airs produced in the home, revealing how medical expertise determined decisions about seemingly mundane matters. This ‘empire of things’, which characterized the wealthiest Italian homes during the Renaissance, also determined the lived experience of its inhabitants, including their digestion, temperature or subjection to bedbugs, in ways that should remind readers of Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub (2007). As both Cockayne and Cavallo remind us, bad air did not always come from outside one’s residence, or an insalubrious district, but was increasingly recognized as generated by the body itself. For this reason, perfuming practices also evolved around this time, as explored by Dugan in 2011 in a book that sought to insert England into modern cartographies of scent. When reviewed here, Dugan’s book was also recognized for communicating the important lesson that ‘sensation is a kind of historical thinking', reiterating an adage that recurs at the outset of most introductions to sensory history.
Just as air was judged by the way it moved, looked and (of course) smelled, water’s quality was determined by its taste, sound, smell and appearance. Water frequently turns up as a standard topic of medical history research, whether dealing with hydrotherapy, sewers or drought. Tomory’s exploration of the quality of London’s drinking water in the eighteenth century, however, is particularly interesting in terms of sensory history for the way in which it weaves elements of moral and spiritual impurity into discussions around the New River and its contamination after it became popular with working-class bathers. The disgust expressed by contemporary commentators equally demonstrates the way in which sensory studies intersect with another emerging historiographical field, the history of emotions.
If some of the articles in this Virtual Issue appear to engage with the senses, without actually addressing the new historiography of the senses, the same cannot be said about Erica Storm’s Roy Porter Student Prize Essay on patent medicines in the early nineteenth century. Storm’s essay considers these remedies in the context of their sensory qualities, including their colours, shapes, textures and, of course, flavours. It also engages with the multisensory way in which the customer’s experience of consuming these medicines was mediated by commercial technologies, namely the way these medicines were wrapped, bottled, boxed, advertised, thereby following other sensory scholars in producing a ‘materialist history of the senses’. Gilded pills, like designer perfume flacons, denoted value, and thereby communicated social taste, but also usefully disguised unpleasant tastes. Storm is almost alone in considering this aspect of medical consumption. As such, she demonstrates that seemingly mundane and private acts can be reinterpreted as vibrant and meaningful processes, especially when scholars take the realm of the sensory into consideration. Alternatively, as expressed differently in this journal by Hannah Newton in 2012, by reading our sources in creative ways, historians can ‘capture the sensations of the sick in past centuries’.
If bad airs and stinking, stagnant waters have become the ubiquitous tropes in histories of olfaction, surely the royal touch is one of the standard ways, along with pulse-taking, in which medical historians have traditionally thought about the sense of touch. In his work, reviewed here, Brogan demonstrates that royal thaumaturgy, practised by Charles II and James II on 100,000 occasions, was regarded as a means to heal both subjects’ bodies and the body politic. Less known than the laying on of royal hands was the desire of some of those people afflicted with swellings and skin conditions to be stroked by the hanged man’s hand, a practice that came into prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century. Davies and Matteoni examined 27 instances of stroking of wens, goitres, scrofula and tumours at executions in Britain between 1758 and 1863 and considered both the presumed benefits of the practice and popular responses to this unusual and dramatic public performance. When hanging was abolished in 1868, the ritual of the hanged man’s hand, like that of its royal counterpart, also naturally came to an end (if almost a century later). However, in its last stages, it had noticeably come under criticism from many who witnessed the practice, not least because of the disgust that this ‘revolting’ spectacle provoked. Again, like Tomory’s study, Davies’ and Matteoni’s article touches on the history of emotions and reveals just how easily these two fields intersect.
As sensational an exploration of tactility as the hanged man’s touch was the late nineteenth-century practice of gynaecological massage. Invented by Thure Brandt, a Swedish Army Major, the manual therapy explored in Anders Ottosson’s article might (to a modern audience) appear to break taboos around touch but, rather than instigate a string of charges of immoral behaviour, this potentially penetrative practice was more often associated with discomfort and pain than sexual stimulation. Gynaecological masseurs, many of whom were women, offered a seemingly natural, hands-on treatment for uterine disease. Like all good sensory history, Ottosson’s article has the potential to overturn our preconceptions, as well as the most established ideas.
Turning to sound and the senses, Kennaway’s article on musical hypnosis again engages more directly with the history of the senses literature. However, like the studies of tactility, not to mention Tomory’s article, it deals with prevailing anxieties about personal autonomy and explores the trance-like states music reputedly induced from the age of Mesmer to the moral panics provoked by rock and roll and heavy metal in the mid-to-late twentieth century. An earlier edited collection by Kennaway, reviewed here, was criticised for its neglect of Mesmer, but he made up for this in his article, which thoroughly explores the role that music played in the German doctor’s system of energy transference. Importantly, like much of the best sensory history, Kennaway acknowledges the ways in which the senses combined in Mesmer’s hypnotic, animal magnetism, which relied upon fixing patients with his eponymous gaze and was further reinforced with ‘sympathetic vibration’ generated by violins, gongs or the glass harmonica.
If there is an involuntary element associated with the study of the senses, this must include the almost automatic way in which historians continue to think through their subjects in a visual manner. The cultural context that elevated the eye above all other sensory organs and allowed the visual to become so dominant culturally cannot be rehearsed here, but was thoroughly explored by Luke Davidson in another of this journal’s prize essays in 1996. After all, medicine, as argued decades ago in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, transformed in the eighteenth century from a symptom-based practice into a visual one, with diagnosis, treatment and prognosis driven by the doctor’s gaze. Of course, practitioners continued to employ their other senses, but the dominance of vision in medicine and society was evident everywhere. England in the nineteenth century, like many other Western European countries, became a gas-lit society and its government expanded the power it exercised through technology, design and administration (as demonstrated by Otter, The Victorian Eye, 2008). Despite developments in surveillance, better illumination not only allowed authorities to better observe populations, but opened the way to achieving greater personal freedoms. Otter’s study concludes in 1910 but Weaver, in this journal, takes this story forward a decade in an article arguing that eyesight in 1920s Britain became a public concern to a previously unseen extent. This is evidenced in Weaver’s examination of key inquiries into the causes of visual impairment and related legislation in these years. Drawing on Caroline Jones’s work, Weaver claims this era witnessed the ‘disaggregation of the senses into compartmentalised units’ that could be more efficiently ‘administered, commodified and contained’. The proliferation of the automobile and invention of the television in subsequent decades merely consolidated vision’s dominance within the sensory hierarchy. Childbirth serves as a tentative link between two final and otherwise very different papers. That by Paula Michaels, explores films and phonographic records used as didactic tools in antenatal classes from the 1950s to the 1980s. As one might expect, the visual nature of these audio-visual artefacts once again places sight at the heart of the discussion, but the inclusion of audio recordings prompts readers to consider more than just the visual spectacle of childbirth. Like other studies of childbirth in this journal, regardless of era, Michaels regularly refers to the pain of delivery, a fact that usefully reminds us that childbirth is a multisensory experience. While modern discourses around birthing pain clearly changed from early modern ones that invoked martyrdom explored by Sharon Howard, the context had clearly changed by the second half of the twentieth century. Emotions of mothers may have been as complex, but recordings now often included fathers who were regularly present during labour and delivery. Screams might also be accompanied by grunting, whistling, blowing, if not the ‘quiet, composed demeanour’ of the Lamaze advocate. If not mute, doctors and midwives equally varied in their approaches, occasionally scolding or encouraging mothers, as did partners, who were not just visually present, but often stroked, caressed or massaged the labouring mother.
Medical historians in recent years have more actively explored new ways of reading for and writing about the senses. One might similarly regard the approaches evident in the articles collected here as indicative of the changing place of sensory history in our field over the last three decades. What was once a very marginal consideration has in the last ten years moved to the centre of many more projects, discussions and debates in the history of medicine. The dominant position of visual culture in the discipline is equally, if gradually, starting to give way, and has been supplemented by studies that are more theoretically informed by the work of leading sensory scholars. Given the rich programme we have been able to assemble for our conference, the pages of this and other medical history journals will only see more examples of such direct engagements with sensory history in the future.
