The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

Historian Purnell aims to show how in the 18th and 19th centuries "people experienced their senses in daily life." Given their understanding of "sensibility," she writes, they "trusted that every decision, sensation, purchase, touch, sight, scent, taste, and experience had the power to transform the mind, body, and personality." This book ranges well beyond the Enlightenment. Its chapters span the "pitch-black markets" of nighttime Paris; Valentin Haüy's school for the blind; Benjamin Franklin's pill that, by changing the scent of the "great Quantity of Wind" that was "produced in the Bowels of human Creatures" might, says Purnell, "make flatulence the sweet-smelling life of the party"; Emanuel Swedenborg's theory about the sixth sense, sex; a 16th-century piano made with live cats; and, William Buckland's effort to eat "his way straight through the whole of animal creation" in Victorian Britain.