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By Root 732 0

God. But starting in America in the nineteenth century, doctors saw the removal of the foreskin as progressive hygiene. In the 1870s, a New York City surgeon claimed that circumcising paralyzed boys cured them. From this bizarre beginning, doctors looked to the uncircumcised penis when there were problems elsewhere, and the more they looked, the more apparent abnormalities they found. The new germ theory also encouraged circumcision, in that the only defence against the hordes of microscopic enemies was prevention, which included surgery. The foreskin, which harboured potentially infectious secretions called smegma, looked eminently operable. In fact, smegma in classical Greek means soap, and the substance needs only to be rinsed off with warm water, but by 1894, the most common reason given for circumcision was hygiene.

Non-ritual circumcision was a twentieth-century phenomenon, limited to the English-speaking world and particularly popular in America. By 1970, it was clear that most of the conditions of the foreskin that doctors had interpreted as disorders were normal, and that an intact penis was no barrier to cleanliness. In 1971 the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that there was no medical rationale for routine circumcision. Circumcisions dropped to 3.8 per cent in Britain and 12 per cent in Canada. The country where rates have remained highest is the United States, where circumcisions have dropped from 85 per cent to about 60 per cent.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Jolyon Forsyte in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga flosses his teeth with sewing thread. Nylon floss became available during World War Two

In North America today, there seems to be no resting place, no point at which we can feel comfortable in our own skins for more than a few hours after our last shower. “Clean” keeps receding into the distance. Although our dream of a perfect body can sound like the ancient Greeks’ glorification of the physical self, Miner is closer to the mark when he describes the Nacirema’s “pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions.” In some ways, we are as repulsed by our real bodies as were the medieval saints, although without their religious motivation. Or, to put it another way, our religion is bodily perfection and any deviation from that unreachable goal is deplorable.

The North American wish to replace our real aroma with one we’ve bought doesn’t surprise Sissel Tolaas, but that doesn’t mean she likes it. Tolaas, who calls her-self a professional provocateur but is more often described as an odour artist, is on a one—woman crusade to lead the “smell-blinded,” as she calls us, back to the valuable, grounding sense we’ve diminished. Although she has never made a commercial fragrance, Tolaas heads a research lab in Berlin for International Flavours and Fragrances Inc., a company that produced perfumes for Ralph Lauren and Prada. At IFF, Tolaas originated the smells of Ikea, Volvo and H&M, but she sees her role more as a gadfly, a perpetual challenge to our conventional ideas about smell.

In her office at IFF, Tolaas closes her eyes, flares her elegant nostrils and takes a deep whiff from a bottle holding the smell of unregenerate, skunky male sweat. She pronounces it “fab-ulous,” and pats a spot on each wrist. She grew up in Iceland and Norway, smelling the air for rain, storms and snow. One day she asked herself why we have so many words for describing what we see and hear, and so few for the nuances of smell, why we undervalue our sense of smell while exalting sight and hearing. She trained herself to experience odour the way our ancestors did—not primarily to be delighted or disgusted but to gain valuable facts or clues. An autodidact because there was no one to teach her, she amassed a “smell archive” of 7,630 jars of different aromas, from dried fish to soiled fabric.

Why is Tolaas so passionate about wanting us to stop and think again about the information we take in through our noses? Because our noses connect us to the most basic reality: we smell our mothers, she points out,