The Smell of the Insane: Disciplining the Olfactory Domain in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists targeted the olfactory domain as an avenue for intervention into the pathologies of the mind. The insane asylum aimed at literally and metaphorically sanitizing the offensive aspects of its patients as a method of “cure.” By virtue of their unpleasant and characteristic odors, which marked them as a deviation from the “fragrant” and “inodorate” elite (Classen 1997 ), the insane were linked to other categories of difference, such as race, ethnicity, and class. Accordingly, the asylum was nested within parallel and overlapping projects to control deviant populations through their subjection to its “sensorial regime” (Hamilakis 2014 ). The administrators of the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts faced an uphill battle in mastering the olfactory domain of their institution, having failed to anticipate the hygienic challenges posed by the concentration of a large population under a single roof. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the distinctive smell of confinement was identified by patients and staff as one of the most noticeable and memorable features of their experiences at the asylum. While 19th-century psychiatrists tended to attribute this odor to difference—i.e., to the deviant and defective physiology of the insane—I argue in this article that it was the olfactory signature of institutionalization, a tangible representation of the failure to achieve an orderly sensorial regime, which was brought about largely by psychiatrists’ misdirected efforts to localize and target the disease in the individual, rather than in the system.