Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/96

84 Then there is the smell of mice which attends upon the skin disease known as favus.

The breath of a chronic drunkard is familiar enough to everybody, and the more delicate aroma in the circumambient atmosphere of the careful tippler, ethereal and by no means unpleasant, will often reveal to the physician the hidden cause of obscure symptoms. It is particularly valuable when your patient is, as so many of these secret drinkers are, a woman, it may be a woman of good social standing.

A disease-odour of great value and significance is the sweet-smelling breath caused by acetone poisoning in the later stages of diabetes.

A sweet smell is also said by Bacon to attend plague :

“The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath the scent of a smell of a mellow apple ; and (as some say) of May-flowers ; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague, as white lilies, cowslips and hyacynth.” (Quoted by Creightcn, A History of British Epidemics,” p. 685, f.n.)

Death sometimes heralds his approach by means of an odour, said in some parts of the country to bring ravens about the house, which may well be true, as it is apparently a summons of the same nature that calls the Indian vulture in flocks from apparently untenanted skies. Birds in general,