Nevertheless we can only look upon this particular liking as acquired, since the high relish of one country but fills its neighbours with disgust.
It is worthy of remark, perhaps, that the last whiff, the final sublimated breath of ripe Gorgonzola as it passes over, is a faint suggestion of ammonia. Curiously enough, this always fills my imagination with the sack of cities and the end of all things in smoke and thunder. It may be because the penultimate phase of life itself is ammonia. Fire, slaughter, and much more besides come quite promptly to this gas for the City of Destruction, what there is left of the remainder in dust and ashes being but a handful for the wind.
To the keen-sensed medical man certain morbid states can be recognised by their exhalations. I have even heard of an enthusiast on the subject who alluded to them as “both visible and tangible”; but that, I think, must be exceptional.
Physicians of the last generation used to speak of typhus fever as having a close, mawkish odour, and the smell of smallpox is horrible. But these, as well as the appalling stench of the hospitals in olden days, are among the smells which have, for the most part, fled our country.
There are others, however, less powerful and repugnant, which are still with us, and which we recognise as among the prominent characteristics of certain maladies, the acid smell of acute rheumatism for one, and I have sometimes thought I could detect a characteristic odour also in acute nephritis, a smell resembling that of chaff. The odour of a big hæmorrhage is unmistakable and, to obstetricians particularly, ominous.
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.