The Odor of Disgust: Contemplating the Dark Side of 20th-Century Cancer History

Abstract

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It investigates how smell, feelings of disgust, and the moral judgments associated with these feelings were interrelated in 20th-century German cancer history. It demonstrates that this complex decisively shaped the emotional experiences of cancer patients. Uncovering this dynamic is only possible by conjoining the history of emotions with a more expanded version of the history of the senses. The combination reveals that the “odor of disgust” was not an ahistorical constant, but was, both in its parts and as a whole, subject to considerable shifts.