This book opens with an episode in 2005, when New Yorkers panicked following the sudden and overpowering advent of a maple-syrup scent. No, Canadians had not invaded the United States, the source turned out to be far more innocuous. But according to Kiechle, the public’s responses to scent on such occasions connect us with an age when aromas announced the arrival of epidemics and sickness. Discussions in nineteenth-century newspapers similarly reveal the anxieties of local “smell detectives” and demonstrate why sensory scholars continue to take scent seriously. In particular, Kiechle’s study explores the way in which Americans experienced their world and attempted to explain it through olfaction throughout a century that witnessed the rise of germ theory, but apparently not a decline in the importance of smelling.

The book considers three types of smell detective. The first is the physician, such as John Hoskins Griscom, whose career as chief medical...

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