Hourad Hajimohammadi

This paper examines how perfume in early modern France was reclassified from a therapeutic substance within medical practice to a luxury commodity associated with fashion, hygiene, and social distinction. In the late seventeenth century, perfumes were embedded in pharmacological traditions and were used as technologies of air purification and bodily protection within humoral and miasmatic medical frameworks. By the eighteenth century, however, transformations in medical authority, court culture, and public health practices gradually displaced aromatics from the center of prophylaxis. As new sanitary policies emphasized ventilation, drainage, and deodorization rather than aromatic masking, perfumes increasingly migrated into the domains of courtly consumption and personal toilette. Through analysis of pharmacological texts, medical debates, court culture, and commercial practices, this paper argues that perfume’s shift from cure to couture reflects a broader reconfiguration of medical authority, sensory culture, and consumer identity in early modern France.

Olfaction has historically occupied an unstable position within scientific and philosophical accounts of knowledge. Because smell is often treated as subjective, private, and difficult to quantify, it has been marginalized within epistemologies that privilege vision, measurement, and mechanical objectivity. Contemporary olfactory science complicates this hierarchy. Modern research environments increasingly rely on trained sensory experts such as perfumers, evaluators, and sensory panelists whose perceptual skills function as calibrated instruments within experimental systems. This paper argues that objectivity in olfactory science is not achieved by eliminating subjectivity but by disciplining and coordinating it. Through the interaction of instrumentation, standardized procedures, and trained perceptual agents, olfactory knowledge emerges as a hybrid epistemic achievement distributed across bodies, technologies, and institutions. The case of olfactory science challenges traditional models of objectivity and reveals how tacit knowledge and embodied expertise can operate as legitimate components of scientific practice.