What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [55]
THE NATURAL HISTORY of odor aversions helps put IEI in perspective. Even the most innocuous scent becomes objectionable if it reminds us of an unpleasant experience. Take the case of Izabella St. James, a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner who did not enjoy her time at the Playboy Mansion. It was apparently Hef’s habit to prepare for festivities in the bedroom by coating himself in baby oil. To this day, says Ms. St. James, the smell of baby oil makes her gag.
Then there is Rolf Bell, a tall, athletic guy in his mid-fifties. When he was six or seven years old, his family visited Mount Lassen in Northern California. They stopped for a picnic at Bumpass Hell, a geothermal area full of boiling mud pots and steaming fumaroles. His mother had prepared egg-salad sandwiches for lunch. After eating his amid clouds of sulfurous steam reminiscent of rotting eggs, little Rolf was left with a permanent olfactory aversion: he hasn’t eaten egg salad since.
We sometimes create odor aversions in a misguided attempt to avoid truly bad smells. It’s a common impulse to mask the smell of decay with a strong and less objectionable odor. The men who collected the bodies of those killed in the 1900 Galveston hurricane were encouraged to wear bourbon-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces, or to smoke strong cigars. Similar advice was given to personnel in the American Graves Registration Unit who searched the European battlefields of World War II for the remains of U.S. servicemen. Sadly, experience shows that a masking scent may become linked to the emotional trauma of body retrieval duty. Today’s military personnel are told not to use cologne to cover the stench.
In January 1987, in the outskirts of Hesperia, a town in San Bernardino County, northeast of Los Angeles, sat a nondescript aluminum building on an asphalt-and-dirt lot surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. The owner of a nearby business noticed flames shooting out of the building’s smokestack. What really grabbed his attention was the smell of the smoke: something he hadn’t smelled since his U.S. Army unit walked past the ovens at a liberated concentration camp in Germany more than forty years earlier. It was the sickening, strangely sweet odor of burning human flesh. His phone calls to local officials began an investigation that uncovered the largest funeral home scandal ever in Southern California, a grim story of stolen body parts and gold fillings and illegally commingled remains.
These are the smells people can’t forget, even if they want to. I’m not talking about clove oil reminding one of a visit to the dentist’s office; I’m talking about the extreme edge of human experience. Smells associated with intense trauma leave an indelible impression. Take the case of a fire department paramedic who was called to treat a garage mechanic injured when an automobile tire exploded. The paramedic tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but the victim’s face was so badly damaged he had trouble locating the mouth. The victim vomited on him and died. The paramedic was found hours later, sitting in a daze in his car in the middle of an intersection. The smell-linked trauma haunted him for years—whenever he encountered a foul odor, it would bring on a sudden attack of nausea.
The Boston psychiatrist Devon Hinton and his colleagues regularly treat Cambodian refugees, many of whom witnessed atrocities during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror between 1975 and 1979. Olfactory-triggered panic attacks are frequent among these survivors. Innocuous smells such as car exhaust, tobacco smoke, and roasting or frying meat can set off anxiety, dizziness, nausea, and a racing heartbeat. These symptoms are sometimes accompanied by flashbacks to horrific scenes that took place amid the smell of exploding ordnance, and the stench of burned bodies and corpses in open mass graves. Hinton’s case summaries vividly record