On Smell, Death, and Funerary Rituals with Helen Frisby, PhD

With co-host Diana Herrmann - family medicine physician and Health Humanities and Bioethics master's student - we speak to historian Helen Frisby, primarily about her chapter "Smelling Death" in the book Religion, Death and the Senses (2024). In this episode, we explore the smellscapes of Victorian funeral rituals, discussing olfactory experiences as diverse as funerary cakes, bee hives and beeswax candles, decaying corpses, and rosemary sprigs. We talk about how smell can be a fleeting memento mori, as it is tied incredibly strongly to memory and nostalgia. We also discuss what we might learn about ourselves and about how we deal with death by looking at (and smelling with) the past.