such trades were also a source of odour pollution for the surrounding area. The fumes from lime kilns were so harmful that Ramazzini professed himself astonished they were allowed in urban centres at all. He also expressed great sympathy for night soil men, who risked losing their sight, though he did believe that the fetid air they breathed in protected them from the plague, and the same for leather curriers. Like Ramazzini, some doctors believed that one cure for airborne contagion was breathing in an even fouler smell, advising readers to protect their health by sniffing at a latrine every morning. This was a serious medical opinion, not folk wisdom; its popularity among the poorest sections of society was doubtless due to the fact that it was free. In 1777, the book’s young French translator added a long note on the extreme dangers faced by night soil men in Paris.25 Fatal suffocation was a real risk on opening a latrine, particularly if it was to be scraped down, which meant disturbing the thick crust of solid matter that settled at the bottom beneath the liquid. The rotting excrement released a dangerous, fetid sewer gas called ‘mofette’ (English has adopted the French term) or ‘plomb’ (the French term for lead, as the symptoms were thought to be similar to those of lead poisoning). The gas sometimes caught fire, as in Lyon in July 1749. The night soil men took vital precautions, including rubbing their hands and faces with vinegar. If a worker fell unconscious after breathing the fumes, he was rubbed down with vinegar, which was also held under his nose, and tobacco smoke was blown over him. He then took a dose of theriac. The 22-year-old translator, the son of an Enlightenment apothecary and himself later to become a well-respected physician and chemist, was still bound up in medical superstition. Cases of fatal sewer gas poisoning among night soil men remained a cause for medical research throughout the nineteenth century.26
Human urine had both helpful and harmful properties. It was widely used as a remedy, as shown by Madame de Sévigné. Doctors advised drinking it to cure hydropsy, and Ramazzini describes nuns drinking it to bring on a menstrual period. The doctors in Molière’s comedy Le Malade imaginaire gravely study their patients’ urine for clues to their state of health, in line with the theory of humours. Other less salubrious practices were a legacy of Antiquity. The Romans dyed wool red by soaking it in urine twice: the poet Martial recorded that the imperial purple gave off an extremely fetid smell. Might this have been a practical demonstration of the famous Roman expression Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima, ‘The Tarpeian Rock is close to the Capitol’, a reminder that it was but a short step from the site of ultimate power to the site of execution? The technique was still in use in fulling, stripping the lanolin from wool, and dyeing as late as 1700. When Ramazzini visited such workshops, he recorded the presence of ‘barrels where all the workers urinate and where the urine is left to rot, to be used in that state’ to bleach cloth so the dyes took better hold. He also wrote of being struck by the powerful, unpleasant stench emanating from such workshops.
He seems to have found them less offensive to visit, however, than those of oil producers, leather curriers, catgut string makers, butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and candle makers. Such places, he wrote, turned his stomach and gave him headaches and nausea. He thought it right that tanners and curriers should be relegated to the fringes of towns and cities, for fear that their odour might befoul the air breathed by people living nearby. The same was true of candle makers, whose workshops he described as ‘noisome’; their boiling cauldrons full of tallow from goats, pigs and cattle ‘throw out a nauseous foul stench that spreads to all the surrounding area’. As the demand for bleached thread and collars and wig powder grew, particularly over the course of the eighteenth century, starch production became a growth industry. Ears of corn were left to soak in water until they germinated, then fulled, generating an unbearable stench that left him feeling unwell.
Graveyards were also a cause of disease, not only for grave diggers. Ramazzini’s French translator must have handed his work in to the publisher shortly before the 1776 order to relocate France’s graveyards out of urban centres, as he complains that it has not yet been done and lists the harmful consequences of their presence, pointing out that keeping the dead cheek by jowl with the living is a dangerous practice, with doctors blaming outbreaks of disease on it. On a more positive note, however, he records that over the past two decades Europe has woken up to the risks of ‘mephitic vapours’.
Much of Ramazzini’s moral censure was reserved for the peasantry, though even then his scholarly superiority and scorn for the rustic masses remained moderate in expression. He simply expressed disapproval of their ‘slothful carelessness in heaping up the dung intended to improve their grounds, right outside their cow byres and pigsties, and just by the door of their dwellings, and keeping it there all summer as a nosegay’. At that rate, he concluded, ‘the air they live in must be polluted with the foul vapours that rise constantly’.
Countryside smells
Nineteenth-century hygienists, appalled at the filth and stink of the villages they visited, bequeathed later generations a very negative image of rural life. Yet in insisting on the need to control odour pollution in the countryside, they were merely projecting their own standards of decency onto country folk. The civilized noses of today, even that of the careless historian, experience the countryside as ‘a concentration of bad smells: sweaty livestock, poultry droppings, rotting rat carcases, bodies living together in a single room, rubbish hidden in dark corners, and combustible fumes steaming from the dung heap outside the door’.27 The country folk themselves had a very different point of view, using the height of dung heaps as a measure of wealth, as has been seen. They were also practical, as the locals used them to relieve themselves. One villager in Flers, near Douai in northern France, was accidentally shot in the buttock at dusk on 17 December 1651 as he ‘did his easement on a mound outside his house’.28 Nor were powerful smells of human or animal origin considered repulsive, particularly as they fulfilled significant social and cultural functions for the community as a whole.29 It is more than likely that for such villagers, their city visitors were the ones who smelled unpleasant.
The myth of the terrible stench polluting the country air spread along with the ‘civilizing process’ from the seventeenth century on, when life in urban centres and at court was increasingly shaped by refined codes of civility that rejected animality and gave rise to new expectations of modest behaviour. Previously, bodily functions were openly carried out in public. Even the king gave audiences from his commode, a practice that proved fatal to Henri III of France, stabbed to death while on the ‘throne’ by the monk Jacques Clément. People would relieve themselves wherever convenient. The seventeenth-century scholar Antoine Furetière recounted an anecdote from the court of Louis XIII in which the queen’s gentleman usher let go of her hand to go and urinate on a wall hanging. The great puddle that formed at the feet of Mademoiselle de Lafayette on another occasion simply made the king laugh. It was common to urinate in corners, on staircases and particularly in fireplaces.30 While such behaviour met with increasing disapproval among the upper classes, it remained common practice lower down the social scale, feeding into elite attitudes of scorn for the masses.
The county of Artois, a province of the Spanish Netherlands before it was conquered by Louis XIII’s troops, offered a rich documentary record of the lives of the rural population. Drinkers at country inns would ‘make water’ outside, in the garden or outbuildings, on the walls of the inn itself or the nearest church or graveyard wall. Some even simply urinated out of the nearest window, like one young man in 1602 who found it highly amusing to soak anyone unfortunate enough to be standing outside. Some documents record the existence of channels in the floor at the foot of each table. Apparently the smell was not a problem. One constant practice was urinating in the fireplace, even when it was lit. One evening in around 1550–1, in Éperlecques, near Saint-Omer in northern France, the innkeeper’s wife was sitting by the hearth when two drunken young bachelors came in to urinate on the fire. One of them turned and splashed her, perhaps as a joke. The other criticized his ungentlemanly behaviour. A quarrel broke out, and the splasher ended up dying from a stab wound. The rural population was aware of the new codes of decency, as the second man’s disapproval in this case indicates. However, his comment on the
