Melanie A. Kiechle. Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. 352 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-74193-2.
Reviewed by Tina M. Peabody (University at Albany, SUNY)
Published on H-Envirohealth (December, 2018)
Commissioned by Michitake Aso (University at Albany, SUNY)
In Smell Detectives, Melanie Kiechle challenges readers to follow their noses to understand the nineteenth-century urban environment. She argues that recreating the olfactory life of cities helps better explain the period’s “environmental consciousness” and its impact on subsequent urban development (p. 6). This environmental consciousness, she contends, rested on a central contradiction. For both sanitary experts and lay people, “common sense” held that foul odors in and of themselves caused sickness, but industrialization increasingly produced an array of disagreeable smells in cities (p. 54). While urbanites “judged the environment through their noses and found cities wanting,” they also valued economic development (p. 6). Thus, they aspired to create cities that provided both industrial growth and fresh, sweet-smelling air. According to Kiechle, this environmental consciousness was challenged by the advent of germ theory and the creation of municipal health boards after the Civil War, which soon claimed authority over olfactory knowledge. She concludes that the new public health bureaucracy deprived the average citizen of a powerful tool for assessing the health of their environment and “taught people to ignore or downplay the environmental knowledge gleaned through their senses, even when their senses speak loudly” (p. 20).
In focusing on the sense of smell to understand nineteenth-century urban landscapes, Kiechle intends to provide a corrective to histories of the period that have focused on social rather than environmental factors and therefore missed the significance of olfactory concerns in shaping cities. She also aims to link sensory and environmental history in fruitful ways. For Kiechle, environmental historians could learn from sensory history’s attention to how humans experience the environment through their bodies, especially in the incorporation of each of the five senses. Meanwhile, she argues that environmental history’s strong sense of place and materiality can provide more nuanced explanations of how sensory experiences have varied across different environments over time.
The first three chapters follow three different groups of “smell detectives”—physicians, city residents navigating public streets, and women in the home—as they responded to increasing industrial stenches and rapid urban growth before the Civil War (p. 17). Their experiences suggest, as Paul Sutter writes in his foreword to the book, that miasma theory was “an empowering and equalizing way of knowing urban nature” since no one claimed sole authority over olfactory knowledge (pp. xiii–xiv). Physicians urged municipalities to take responsibility for assuring fresh air and produced a body of sanitary reports and surveys between the 1840s and 1860s to document the degraded urban environmental conditions. Physicians lacked the political power to push forward significant sanitary reform, so city dwellers crafted individual strategies for dealing with stenches, ranging from taking different routes around the city to seeking out sweet scents and carrying nosegays. Meanwhile, women took primary responsibility for protecting the air in the home. Domestic manuals advised women to properly ventilate their homes, arrange rooms to control the proliferation of odors into living areas, and use plants or flowers at entryways and windows to sweeten the air.
The next two chapters demonstrate that the Civil War challenged the “common sense” of urban residents by creating a health and sanitation bureaucracy, which claimed authority over olfactory knowledge. Kiechle shows that Civil War encampments and hospitals faced many of the same sanitary challenges as rapidly growing urban areas. Wartime conditions resulted in similarly powerful odors and massive loss of life due to disease. In that sense, the wartime experience supported the idea that odors caused illness. At the same time, the war helped build support for creating municipal health boards across the United States and provided physicians and sanitary experts increased political clout to institute sanitary reforms. While the newly developed health boards provided a forum for citizens to report dangerous odors, they were not well equipped to handle these olfactory complaints since smells were often short-lived and difficult to verify. Even when odors could be confirmed by health officials, conflicts ensued about the source of odors and which municipalities should take responsibility for abatement.
The remaining chapters trace the shifts in environmental consciousness and urban development that resulted from the new health bureaucracy and the proliferation of germ theory. Kiechle emphasizes that the discovery of germs did not immediately change either individual health practices or the concern over foul odors. Women incorporated new scientific ideas about chemical disinfectants and air quality alongside their former domestic habits. Women were taught to identify new potential sources of dangerous smells in the home such as sewer gas and were aware of the effectiveness of chemical disinfectants (often with their own pungent scents), while continuing to value proper ventilation and flower-freshened air. City residents also challenged municipal health officials in the courts when they failed to respond to their complaints, increasingly drawing upon visual evidence to prove that odors were health hazards. Ultimately, as wealthier urban residents increasingly left the city center for suburbs in the early twentieth century and zoning laws segregated their living spaces from the smells of industry, exposure to foul odors became heavily divided by class and interpreted as a failing of the poor and industrial laborers.
Focusing on the sense of smell allows Kiechle to challenge commonly held ideas about miasma theory and shine a new light on the motivations behind urban sanitary reform. As Paul Sutter points out, the idea that parks served as the city’s “lungs” has generally been interpreted figuratively, and many historians primarily emphasize social and class motivators for park construction and sanitary reform (p. xii). While histories such as Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan (2014) and Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar’s The Park and the People (1998) have shown that economic motives and class biases played a critical role in movements for city parks or nuisance abatement, these sanitary reform efforts take on more significant meanings for public health when we start from the premise that odors caused illness. Moreover, Kiechle’s focus on women helps contextualize the “municipal housekeeping” of the Progressive Era by tracing women’s role in protecting the home environment well before they organized to protect city streets. In addition, her exploration of the interplay between homes and public space is crucial to discussions of the urban environment, where the division between public and private is so tenuously defined. Smells in Kiechle’s narrative operate much like the pests in Dawn Biehler’s Pests in the City (2015), floating between homes and public spaces where boundaries of authority shift over time. In that sense, smells are particularly well suited to demonstrate the spatial complexities that make urban environmental problems so intractable.
That said, Smell Detectives perhaps overstates the extent to which odors lost their political power in the twentieth century. While Kiechle shows that experts continued to battle city residents for authority over smells, she also argues that “the bureaucratization of public health and the turn from miasma to microbes have all but eliminated discussions of stench from our political discourse” (p. 20). Yet, the history of waste management in the United States suggests that discussions of odor remained central to the politics of sanitation. My own research on waste management in New York City has shown that complaints over garbage dumps and waste management plants could influence disposal strategies. For example, New York City’s Department of Sanitation saw lessening or eliminating odor complaints as one of the many benefits of sanitary landfilling in the late 1930s and 1940s. Health and sanitation officials certainly overlooked the olfactory concerns of citizens at times, but persistent fears about the impact of foul odors—even if they were not viewed as directly causing disease—continued to drive citizen protest and shape the politics of urban sanitation.
Smell Detectives also raises methodological questions about telling the history of actors not often represented in archives. Kiechle’s account of women’s role in protecting the home from odors, for instance, is based heavily on domestic advice manuals. She relies in particular on the work of Catherine Beecher, which she readily acknowledges spoke primarily to middle-class readers. We learn more, then, about what a select class of women were instructed to do than how women managed their homes in practice. Kiechle makes it clear that poor, immigrant women living in tenements were unable to implement domestic advice such as Beecher’s; but without knowing how these women thought about odors and disease it is hard to say if they would have followed Beecher’s advice even if they had the means to do so. For that matter, one might wonder whether the advice of Beecher and other domestic experts was followed by a majority of middle-class women. It might have benefited Kiechle’s narrative, then, to examine how ideas about odor and disease differed among class and ethnic groups. Determining whether women accepted and rejected parts of miasma theory depending on class and culture would be especially useful since the heart of Kiechle’s discussion of germ theory is the complex interplay between lay understandings and scientific discourse.
Overall, olfactory and sensory histories like Kiechle’s should continue to play a prominent role in the scholarship of the urban environment. Histories of twentieth-century cities would greatly benefit from extensions of Kiechle’s work to other crucial moments in urban history. One wonders, for example, how a history of urban renewal and the deterioration of the urban core in the 1970s would look from the perspective of smell. How would the odors of ailing cities in this period compare to the nineteenth century that Kiechle describes? Did strategies for combating urban odors persist even after germ theory declared that smells in and of themselves were not harmful? Are there ways in which the environmental movement of the latter twentieth century revived some of the earlier faith in individual olfactory or sensory knowledge? Good historical writing raises as many new questions as it answers, and Kiechle’s work has provided plenty of fodder for future exploration.
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Citation:
Tina M. Peabody. Review of Kiechle, Melanie A., Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America.
H-Envirohealth, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53134
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