Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 15

Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), professor of medicine at the Universities of Modena and later Padua, published De Morbis Artificum Diatriba [On the Diseases of Workers] in 1700.²⁴ Reprinted with additional material in 1713, the book proved a major success, being translated into numerous languages; Ramazzini’s role as the founder of modern occupational health is a subject of some debate in specialist circles.

He explained that the idea for the book first came to him while watching night soil men at work in his home, basing his research on direct observation and theoretical inquiry. He noted that all trades were associated with specific ailments, studying over fifty trades and their health issues. Some diseases had physical causes such as heat, cold or damp, for instance in glass workers, bakers and brick makers. Others stemmed from lengthy, violent or irregular efforts or repetitive postures affecting the body. Polluted workspaces could also have a deleterious effect on the health of those working there. The colours and substances used by painters, such as red lead, cinnabar, Venice lead, varnishes, walnut and linseed oil and so on, caused a ‘foul, latrinal smell’ in their studios, eventually killing off their sense of smell altogether – though they may have sought consolation in their superior eyesight. Those making wines and spirits became drunk on the fumes of their produce. Apothecaries also suffered from the harmful effects of the preparations they handled. Ramazzini advised them to drink vinegar for the good of their health when making laudanum. Other doctors made considerable use of vinegar during outbreaks of plague, as it was thought to neutralize the corrupt air causing contagion. Pleasant smells could also have harmful effects: apothecaries making springtime rose infusions often complained of headaches.

Many 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’.