AROMATICS AND THE SOUL
DISEASES OF
THE THROAT, NOSE,
AND EAR
By DAN MCKENZIE, M.D., F.R.C.S.E.
Royal 8vo. 650 pages. 2 Coloured
Plates and 198 Illustrations.
=42s.= net.
_Times Literary
Supplement._—“There is probably
no better book on this branch of
medicine and surgery in
existence.”
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
(MEDICAL BOOKS) LTD.
AROMATICS AND THE SOUL
A STUDY OF SMELLS
BY
DAN McKENZIE, M.D. (GLASG.)
FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, EDINBURGH
“Natura rerum quae sit odoribus intenta sunt....”
_Q. Horatii Flacci Carminum_, Lib. V.
“There are whose study is of smells”
_R. Kipling’s version of the same_
[Illustration]
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
(MEDICAL BOOKS) LTD.
1923
INSCRIBED TO
DR. V. H. WYATT WINGRAVE
IN ADMIRATION
OF
AN INDOMITABLE SPIRIT
_Printed in Great Britain._
PREFACE
Having, as I thought, completed this book—bar the Preface, which is, of
course, always the last chapter—I sent it in manuscript to an old friend
of mine for his opinion.
He let me have it.
“Your brochure,” he wrote, “is remarkable more perhaps for what it omits
than for what it contains. For example, there is no mention whatever
made of the _vomero-nasal organ, or organ of Jacobson_.”
Then, after drastically sweeping away the much that seems to him
redundant in the body of the work, he closes his general criticism
(which I omit) with “I should like to have heard your views on the
vomero-nasal organ. Parker devotes a whole chapter to it.”
A carpenter, according to the adage, is known by his chips. And it was
by the simple removal of some superfluous marble, as everyone knows,
that the Venus of Milo was revealed to the world—which is only another
way of saying the same thing.
But what sort of a carpenter is he who leaves among his chips the
mouldings of his door? And what should we say of the sculptor, even in
these days, who would treat as a superfluity his lady’s chin?
No mention of the vomero-nasal or Jacobson’s organ! A serious, nay! a
damning, defect.
So here am I trying to atone for the sin of omission by giving the
neglected item place of honour in my Preface. “The stone which the
builders rejected....”
But my motive for erecting it here, in the gateway to my little pagoda
of the perfumes, is not quite so simple as I am pretending. The fact is
that in my capacity as creator I predetermined, I actually foredained,
the omission from my text of the structure to which “Parker devotes a
whole chapter.”
I am sorry in some ways. But as the Aberdeen minister so consolingly
said: “There are many things the Creator does in His offeecial capacity
that He would scorn to do as a private indiveedual.”
You see, I had a feeling about it. One of those feelings artists are
subject to. (But a scientific writer an artist?—Certainly! Why not?)
I felt, to be quite frank, that if I were to interpolate a description
and a discussion of this _minutia_ my book would ... would.... Quite so.
The artist will understand.
I came, in short, to look upon this “organ,” this nose within a nose, as
a touchstone, so to speak. The thing became a Symbol.
But here we plunge head over heels into the Subjective, on the other
side of which stream lie the misty shades of the Occult. For that is
what happens to you when you begin talking about Symbols.
However, we shall not be crossing to the other side on this occasion, my
symbolism being after all but a humdrum affair.—Merely this, that to me
this organ of Jacobson is the symbol of the Exhaustive—of the minute,
punctilious, unwearying, laboured comprehensiveness, Teutonic in its
over and under and through, that characterises the genuine, the
reliable, scientific treatise and renders it so desperately full of
interest—to examinees.
Imagine, if you can, the indignation of kindly Sir Walter were the news
ever to reach him in Valhalla that urchins now at school are not only
forced to study his light-hearted romances as holiday tasks, but are
actually examined upon them!
So, comparing small things with great, let me say: “_Absit omen_.”
My faith in the spoken charm of that phrase is, however, none too
robust. Heaven helps the man who helps himself. And so, by way of
reinforcing the Powers in their efforts to divert professorial attention
from this essay of mine, I am leaving it, by a careful act of
carelessness, incomplete.
Here, then, you have the real reason for my exclusion of the organ of
Jacobson (and the like). It is merely a dodge to prevent the book ever
becoming a task in any way, for any one, at any time.
He who runs may read herein, then, without slackening pace—or he may
refrain from reading, just as he pleases, seeing that he can never be
under the compulsion of remembering a single word I have written.
This, if I may say so, is, in my opinion, the only kind of book worth
reading. At all events, it is the only kind I ever enjoy reading, and I
say if a book is not enjoyable it is already placed upon the only Index
Expurgatorius that is worth a ... an anathema.
D. M.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE v
I. OLFACTION AND PUBLIC HEALTH 1
II. THE SENSE OF OLFACTION IN LOWER ANIMALS 21
III. OLFACTORY MEMORY 43
IV. SMELL AND SPEECH 59
V. SMELL IN FOLK-LORE, RELIGION, AND HISTORY 66
VI. THE ULTIMATE 79
VII. SMELL AND THE PERSONALITY 87
VIII. THEORIES OF OLFACTION 98
IX. DUST OF THE ROSE PETAL 140
AROMATICS AND THE SOUL
CHAPTER 1
OLFACTION AND PUBLIC HEALTH
I sing of smells, of scents, perfumes, odours, whiffs and niffs; of
aromas, bouquets and fragrances; and also, though temperately and
restrainedly I promise you, of effluvia, reeks, fœtors, stenches, and
stinks.
A few years ago I stood before the public singing another song. By no
means a service of praise it was, but something of the order of a
denunciatory psalm, wherein I invoked the wrath of the high gods upon
such miscreants as make life hideous with din.
You must not think that imprecations cannot be sung. All emotional
utterance is song, said Carlyle; only he said it not quite so briefly.
And, leaving on one side the vituperations of his enemies by King David
(if he it was who wrote the Psalms) which we still chant upon certain
days of the Christian year, it may be remembered that in bygone times
when the medical practitioner was a wizard (or a witch) and uttered his
(or her) spell to stay the arrows of Apollo, it not infrequently
contained a denunciation of some brother (or sister) practitioner of the
art (how times are changed!), and it was known, in Rome at all events,
as a _carmen_, a song. Hence, say the etymologists, the English word
“charm,” which still, of course, characterises the modern witch, if not
the modern wizard—neither of whom, we may add, is nowadays a medical
practitioner.
Besides, denunciations are, of course, grunted and growled with more or
less of a semblance of singing in modern opera. To substantiate my words
I need only mention that interminable scene—or is it an act?—of gloom
and evil plottings by Telramund and Ortrud in _Lohengrin_.
But if I am again singing, this time, I trust, my voice will sound in
the ears of my hearers less shrill, less strident, less of a shriek.
For, in sooth, the present theme is one upon which we are justly
entitled, in so far as England and Scotland at all events are concerned,
to raise what would be a _Nunc Dimittis_ of praise and thanksgiving,
were it not that the price of cleanly air like that of liberty is
eternal vigilance, seeing that our nostrils are no longer offended by
the stenches our forefathers had to put up with. That they endured such
offences philosophically, cheerfully even, laughing at the
unpleasantness as men do at a bad smell, is true. Nevertheless most
people in those days probably felt as much objection to a vile odour as
Queen Elizabeth, for example, did, the sharpness of whose nose, her
biographers tell us, was only equalled by the sharpness of her tongue.
Irishmen who do me the honour of tasting this light omelette of
scientific literature will have noticed, I am sure, that I have not
included the sister isle in my olfactory paradise. And indeed, I
hesitated long before passing it over, because I am a man of peace—at
any price where the Land of Ire is concerned. But alas! I am by nature
truthful and only by art mendacious. And there sticks horrible to my
memory the fumous and steamy stench of parboiled cabbage that filled the
restaurant-car of the train for Belfast—yes! Belfast, not Dublin—one
evening as I landed at Kingstown. The sea had been—well! it was the
Irish Sea, and I stepped on to the train straight from the mail-boat, so
that ... in a word, I remember that luscious but washy odour too vividly
to bestow upon Ireland the white flower of a stenchless life.
In these remarks I have been careful to observe that the train was not
the Dublin train, but if any one feels moved to defend the capital city,
let him first of all take a stroll down by the Liffey as it flows
fermenting and bubbling under its bridges, and then ... if he can....
Let me, however, in justice to that grief-stricken country, spray a
little perfume over my too pungent observations. I can also recall after
many years a warm and balmy evening in the town of Killarney, the
peaceful close to a day of torrential rain. The setting sun, glowing
love through its tears, was reddening the sky and the dark green hills
around, those hills of Ireland where surely, if anywhere on this earth,
heaven is foreshadowed. And linked in memory with that evening’s glory
there comes, like the gentle strain of a long-forgotten song, the rich,
pungent smell of turf-smoke eddying blue from low chimneys into the soft
air of the twilight. Ireland! Ireland! What an atmosphere of love and
grief that name calls up! Surely the surf that beats upon the strands of
Innisfail far away is more salt, more bitter, and perhaps for that very
reason more sweet, than the waters of any of the other beaches that
ocean bathes!
Thence also comes a memory of heliotrope. It grew by a cottage just
beyond a grey granite fishing-harbour in Dublin Bay, and brings also,
with its faint, ineffable fragrance, the same inseparable blending of
emotions that clings, itself a never-dying odour, to the memory of
holidays in Ireland. There is a phrase in a song, simple, sentimental,
even silly if you like, that prays for “the peace of mind dearer than
all.”
“But what,” I remember asking the mother of our party—“what is meant by
‘peace of mind’?” Her wistful smile seemed to me to be a very inadequate
reply to my question—which, by the way, I am still asking.
It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the
pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first
impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple
accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive
odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of
interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as
well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most
part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its
inhabitants.
The reason assigned by the man in the street for this reform was, and
indeed still is, that stenches breed epidemic diseases. In a noisome
smell people imagine a deadly pestilence, probably because patients
affected with such epidemic diseases as smallpox, typhus, and
diphtheria, give off nauseating odours. Now, bad smells from drains and
cesspools do not of themselves induce epidemic disease. Nevertheless,
there is this much of truth in the superstition, that where you have bad
smells you have also surface accumulations of filth, and these, soaking
through soil and subsoil, contaminate surface wells, until it only
requires the advent of a typhoid or other “carrier” to set a widespread
epidemic a-going. Further, as recent investigators have shown us, the
loathsome and deadly typhus fever, known for years to be a
“filth-disease,” is carried by lice, which pests breed and flourish
where bodily cleanliness is neglected and personal odours are strong.
So that in this, as in most superstitions, there is a substratum of
truth.
But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those
scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support
from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their
objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations
occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same
instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of
the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to
translate its urgings into practice.
The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or
instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere
individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading
to a general popular reformation?
The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due
to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation
operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public
benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in
the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement,
they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and
so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also
in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement
implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There
is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell
and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of
nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here
dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that
evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by
Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred,
to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with
the evil thing.
Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated:
either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered
more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised
life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action.
And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more
noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.
A citizen of Cologne in Coleridge’s days, for example, must have been
anosmic to most of the seven-and-twenty stenches that offended the
Englishman, and in my own time I have counted as many as ten
objectionable public perfumes, yea! even in Lucerne, the “Lovely
Lucerne” of the railway posters. Several of these, perhaps, did not
amount to more than a mere whiff, just the suspicion of a something
unpleasant, no more (but no less) disturbing than, say, one note a
semitone flat in a major chord; two or three of them, however, to the
sensitive, thin-winged organ of an English school-ma’am, would have
attained to the rank of a “smell,” a word on her lips as emphatic as an
oath on yours or mine; four of them, at the least, were plain stenches,
and so beyond _her_ vocabulary altogether; and one was—well! beyond even
mine, but only too eloquent itself of something ugly and bloated, some
mess becoming aerial just round the corner. I did not turn that corner.
Now, the people of Lucerne could never have smelled them, or at all
events they could never have appreciated those perfumes as I did, or the
town would have been evacuated. Their olfactory sense compared with mine
must have been a stupid thing, dense to begin with, and cudgelled by use
and wont into blank insensibility. Because, it is obvious, delicacy in
this, as in all the senses, can only be acquired by avoiding habitual
overstimulation. And that avoidance is only possible in a country where
odours are fine, etherealised, rare.
Even in France, France the enlightened, the sensitive, the refined,
primitive odours pervade the country, as our Army knows very well. Not
only is the farm dunghill given place of honour in the farm courtyard,
close to doors and windows, but even in the mansions of the wealthy the
cesspool still remains—not outside, but inside, the house, the
water-carriage system, even the pail-system (if that can be called a
system), being unknown. So that our Army authorities had to send round a
peculiar petrol-engine, known to the Tommies as “Stinking Willie,” to
empty those pools of corruption. Some of the monasteries used by us as
hospitals were, at the beginning of the war, even worse.
From this we may surmise that the olfactory sense of our neighbours is
not yet so sensitive as is ours.
But in this matter Western Europe, at its worst—say, in one of the
corridor-trains to Marseilles—is a mountain-top to a pigstye compared
with the old and gorgeous East. “The East,” ejaculated an old Scotsman
once—“the East is just a smell! It begins at Port Said and disna stop
till ye come to San Francisco, ... if there!” he added after a pause.
From his sweeping condemnation we must, however, exempt Japan.
Who can ever forget the bazaar smells of India, the mingled must and
fust with its background of garlic and strange vices, or the still more
mysterious atmospheres of China with their deep suggestion of musk?
Naturally the air of a cold country is clearer of obnoxious vapours than
that of tropical and subtropical climes, but in spite of that, the first
whiff of a Tibetan monastery, like that of an Eskimo hut, grips the
throat, they say, like the air over a brewing vat.
So that, after making every allowance for the favour of Nature, we are
still entitled to claim that the relative purity of England, and of
English cities, towns and even villages, is an artificial achievement.
I may therefore, with justice, raise a song of praise to our fathers who
have had our country thus swept and garnished, swept of noxious vapours
and emanations, and garnished with the perfume of pure and fresh air, to
the delight and invigoration of our souls.
And yet the change has only recently been brought about. Up to the
beginning of the nineteenth century the city of London
“was certainly as foul as could be. The streets were unpaved or
paved only with rough cobble stones. There were no side walks. The
houses projected over the roadway, and were unprovided with
rain-water gutters, and during a shower rain fell from the roofs
into the middle of the street. These streets were filthy from
constant contributions of slops and ordure from animals and human
beings. There were no underground drains, and the soil of the town
was soaked with the filth of centuries. This sodden condition of the
soil must have affected the wells to a greater or less extent.”
(“London, Sanitary and Medical,” by G. V. Poore. 1889.)
Moreover, the nineteenth century was well on its way before the last of
the private cesspools disappeared from the dwelling-houses of London.
Edinburgh during the Middle Ages was, we are told, fresher and cleaner
upon its wind-swept ridge than London, but with the erection of lofty
houses in the High Street and Haymarket of the northern capital its
atmosphere became much worse than that of London. The reason for this
was that while the London houses remained low, and the population
therefore, for a city, widely distributed, in those of Edinburgh, on the
other hand, a large community of all classes of society was
concentrated, from the noble lord and lady to the beggarly caddie and
quean. And the whole stew was quite innocent of what we call drainage.
Quite. Yet the waste-products of life, the lees and offscourings of
humanity, all that housemaids call “slops,” had to be got rid of. Very
simple problem this to our worthy Edinburgh forefathers. After dark the
windows up in these “lands” were thrust open, and with a shrill cry of
“Gardy-loo” (_Gardez l’eau_) the cascade of swipes and worse fell into
the street below with a splash and an od—. “Ha! ha!” laughed Dr. Johnson
to little Boswell; “I can smell you there in the dark!”
The hygienic reformation of Britain, although adumbrated by sundry laws
made at intervals from the fifteenth century onwards, was not seriously
taken in hand until as late as the sixties of last century, and
Disraeli’s famous Act defining a bad smell as a “nuisance” became law in
1875.
But although we may justly congratulate ourselves upon the hygienic
achievements of England, one result of which has been the minimising of
unpleasant odours, nevertheless, as a wider consideration of the facts
will show us, the task of cleansing the air of England is not yet
entirely completed. It is doubtless true that what we may term domestic
stenches have for the most part been dispelled, but as regards public
fœtors there are still, I regret to say, a few that abide with us,
seemingly as nasty as ever they were.
One deplorable instance you will encounter at the Paddington terminus of
the Great Western Railway no less, at a certain platform of which
station, lying in wait for our fresh country cousins on their arrival in
London, there lurks a livid concoction of ancient milk, horse-manure,
live stock, dead stock, and, in the month of July, fermenting
strawberries, as aggressive and unashamed as the worst Lucerne has to
offer. I commend it to the attention of the Medical Officer of Health
for Paddington.
Nay more! This West London efflorescence does not lie blooming alone. It
is by no means the last rose of summer. On the east side of the great
city, another, a rival upas-tree, spreads its nauseating blight. This is
a mess that, oozing from a soap factory near Stratford-atte-Bow,
envelops in its oleaginous cloud several hundred yards of the main line
of the Great Eastern Railway. And the world we live in is so arranged
that the trains, particularly in summer, are held up by signal for
several minutes in this neighbourhood, so that, as the greasy slabs of
decomposing fats slump in at the open carriage windows, an early
opportunity is afforded to our Continental visitors of becoming
acquainted with the purifying properties of English soap.
I am blushing now for what I have been saying about Ireland, Cologne,
Lucerne, France, and even the East.
This last instance, however, opens up a large subject, that, namely, of
malodorous industries. Of these there is a great number, too great
indeed for me to do more than make a passing allusion to them. The
proximity of evil-smelling works and factories to human habitations is,
as a matter of fact, prohibited by the Public Health Acts, but it is
naturally impossible to remove them entirely from the knowledge of
mankind inasmuch as the workers frequently carry the atmosphere about
with them. Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for us, by reason of
the rapid exhaustion of the olfactory sense (which we are about to deal
with in the following section), they are, for the most part, not
incommoded by the objectionable airs they work in.
Perhaps the worst of all are the bone-manure factories, malodorous mills
which are almost invariably situated at a distance of several miles from
any dwelling-house, as it would be impossible for any one but the
workers themselves to live in their neighbourhood. These unfortunate
people, many of whom are women, carry, as I have already remarked, the
stench about with them on their clothing and persons, and I have
observed that, being themselves insensitive to the odour, they cannot
rid themselves of it even on Sundays and holidays.
In this class also we must place tanneries, glueworks, and size
factories, a visit to which is a severe trial for any one unaccustomed
to them. Dyeworks, likewise, by reason of the organic sulphur compounds
they disseminate through the spongy air, are unpleasant neighbours. In
cotton mills, also, the sizing-rooms are objectionable, and here,
curiously enough, the operatives do not seem to become accustomed to the
smell, as it is insinuatingly rather than bluntly offensive, and grows
worse with use. So much so, indeed, that but few of the girls, I am
told, are able to remain in that particular occupation for more than a
few weeks at a time.
At this stage, albeit early in our disquisition, we may appropriately
turn to consider the curious fact that of all our senses that of smell
is perhaps the most easily exhausted. The olfactory organ, under the
continued stimulation of one particular odour, quite quickly becomes
insensitive to it. Perhaps this is the reason, or one of the reasons,
why reform was so long delayed.
There are, however, in this respect great differences between odours.
With some the smell is lost in a few seconds, while with others we
continue to be aware of it for a much longer time. Curiously enough,
odours seem, in this matter, to follow the general law of the feelings
in that the pleasant are lost sooner than the unpleasant. It is the
first breath of the rose that makes the fullest appeal, when the whole
being becomes for a moment suffused with the loveliest of all perfumes.
But only for a moment. All too soon the door of heaven closes and the
richness thins away into the common airs of this our lower world.
On the other hand, the aversion we all feel from substances like
iodoform, or, what is worse, scatol, owes not the least part of its
strength to the fact that both of those vile smells are very persistent.
As was once said to a surgeon applying iodoform to a wound in a
patient’s nose: “This patient will certainly visit you again, sir,
but—it will not be to consult you!”
To this more or less rapid exhaustion of the sense is due the merciful
dispensation that no one is aware of his own particular aura. We are
only cognisant of odours that are strange to us. The Chinese and
Japanese find the neighbourhood of Europeans highly objectionable, and
we return the compliment. It is the stranger to the Island who remarks
the “very ancient and fish-like smell.”
Fatigue and then exhaustion of a sense-organ, rendering it finally
irresponsive to a particular stimulus, is, of course, familiar to us
also in the case of vision, as the soap advertisement of our boyhood
with its complementary colours taught us. Taste manifests the same
phenomenon, for which reason (so he says) the cheese-taster in Scotland
swallows a little whisky after each of the different samples he tries.
But, curiously enough, the healthy ear is not thus dulled save by a very
loud, persistent noise, and then there is the risk of permanent damage
to the hearing organ. Some forms of tactile sensation, also, would seem
to remain ever sensitive, for, although it may be possible to become so
inured to pain as to ignore it, yet that is probably a mental act, and
it is said, moreover, that men have been tortured to death by the
tickling of the soles of their feet.
But, as we have already seen, of all the senses none so quickly becomes
inert under stimulation as olfaction. Why it would be hard to say,
unless, like the exhaustion of colour-vision, it is due to the using up
of some chemical reagent in the sense-organ. At all events, if you wish
to appreciate the full intensity of a smell, you should arrange to come
upon it from the open air.
I wonder if this, or something like it, is the reason why England was
the first country in the world to wage war against its stenches. For the
English are of all races the most addicted to fresh air. Consequently,
they are the most likely to keep habitually their olfactory sense
unspoiled and virgin. This, I admit, is only pushing the matter a step
further back, and we are still left with the question: Why is it that
the English are so fond of the open? Largely, I imagine, because their
climate is so damp that an indoor atmosphere is always a little
oppressive to them.
Whatever may be the reason, however, there is no doubt that the keen,
clean chill of an English April day, especially when the wind is in the
east (_pace_ Mr. Jarndyce), brings to us an exaltation of spirit that
surpasses the exhilaration of wine, and at the same time renders us
impatient with mustiness and fustiness, intolerant of domestic
stuffiness, and frankly disgusted with the pungent, prickly vapours of
intimate humanity in the mass. The wind on the hilltop is our
aspiration, our ideal. Hence, maybe, the Public Health Acts, and also
the national tub.
The use of the domestic bath is, we must not forget, a social revolution
of our own day and generation. Our grandfathers ventured upon a bath
only when it seemed to be called for—by others. Our grandmothers, with
their clean, white cotton or linen undergarments, had, or thought they
had, even less need for it. Besides, in their prim and bashful eyes the
necessary denudation antecedent to total immersion would have amounted,
even when they were alone, to something like gross indecency. Before
their time, again, in the eighteenth century, matters were even worse,
for the society ladies of that day painted their faces _instead_ of
washing them, and mitigated the effects of seldom-changed underclothing
by copiously drenching themselves with musk and other reliable perfumes.
(I am told, however, that even to-day fashionable ladies refrain from
washing their faces!)
The domestic bathroom is the direct offspring of the gravitation
water-supply and the modern system of drainage. Buy an old house, and
you will have to convert one of the bedrooms into your bathroom, and, to
this day, you must carry your bath with you if you go to reside in
certain of the Oxford colleges.
I can myself remember in my younger days in Scotland an old doctor
having his first bath in the palatial surroundings of a modern bathroom.
Not in his own house, needless to say! After a patient and particular
inspection of all the glittering taps of “shower,” “spray,” “plunge,”
and what not, he commended his spirit to the Higher Powers—or rather, I
fear, according to his wont, for he was not of the Holy Willie
persuasion, to the keeping of those of the Nether Regions. Then he
proceeded gingerly to insert into the steaming water first of all his
toes, then his feet, next his ankles, and so bit by bit, until, greatly
daring, he had committed his entire body to the deep—to emerge as soon
as possible! He was no coward, let me tell you, in the ordinary run of
life. But this was his first bath in the altogether since his primal
post-natal plunge. His first bath! And his last! It nearly killed him,
he said; never in all his life had he felt so bad, and not for a
thousand pounds would he repeat the experiment!
One more tale. Cockney this time. A gentleman of my acquaintance was one
day discussing with an old-fashioned baker the modern making of bread by
machinery. Both agreed that the older method made the better bread. The
new was not so good. “It seems,” said my friend, “as if nowadays bread
lacks something, but what that something is I cannot tell.”
“You are puffickly right, sir,” returned the baker. “It does lack
something, and wot that something is I can tell you—it lacks the aromer
of the ’uman ’and!”