Flowing through winding streets of London were smells, so common during the Great Plague (瘟疫) of the 17th century that they almost meant the plague itself, historians said. For hundreds of years, people believed that disease was spread not through tiny drops or insect bites, but through taking in unpleasant smells. To purify the air around them, they would burn rosemary and hot tar.
Now, as the world faces another widespread outbreak, a team of historians and scientists from six European countries is seeking to identify and categorize the most common smells of daily life across Europe from the 16th century to the early 20th century and to study what changes in smells over time reveal about society.
The project will search through more than 250,000 images and thousands of texts, including medical textbooks, novels and magazines in seven languages. Researchers will use machine learning and AI to analyze references to smells. Once they are cataloged, researchers, working with chemists and perfumers, will re-create roughly 120 smells with the hope that museums will incorporate some of them into exhibits to make visits more immersive (沉浸式的) or memorable to museum-goers. The use of smells in exhibits could also make museums more accessible for blind people and those with limited sight, historians said.
"With smell, you can open up questions about national culture, global culture and differences between communities," said Dr. Inger Leemans, a professor of cultural history at Vrije University Amsterdam. He said that introducing smells into museums or classrooms leads people to open up in discussions in ways they do not always do when discussing other issiues of national identity. "It is such an open topic and what we want to do is think about how we can bring history to the nose."