Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/17

Rh 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