BOOK REVIEW / The stinking man's guide to perfume: Sue Gaisford on a philosophical study of camel gut, boar's breath and other famous smells: Scent - Annick Le Guerer, Tr. Richard Miller: Chatto & Windus, pounds 14.99

HERE IS a tale of hideous revenge. A scorned woman, discovering her lover's unfaithfulness, went to his house and took down his bedroom-curtains. Into the hollow tube of the curtain-rail she packed two pounds of fresh prawns, reassembled the whole thing and slipped quietly away. Silently, remorselessly, the prawns rotted. She watched the man call in experts - cleaners, rat-catchers, fumigators, probably even exorcisers, in increasingly frantic efforts to locate and destroy the horrible smell. At last he gave up. He put the house on the market and the day he moved she went to watch again. To her inexpressible joy he was taking his curtain-rails with him.

This story was revealed to the world - or to that part of it which listens to Radio 4 - by its proud perpetrator last month. It illustrates the central thesis of Annick Le Guerer's book, that the sense of smell is powerful and dangerously underrated. This is something you know all too well if, like me, you have spent the last week offering large cash payments to anyone who would seek out and destroy an ex-mouse that was putrefying somewhere under the floorboards and clobbering the delicately pleasing waft of pine-needles that preceded it.

Scent is an odd book, made odder by the kind of almost-translation that gives free rein to a boquet of philosophes who wish to pique their curiosity as to the salubrity of their emunctories (sic, throughout). This is the kind of thing that gives the editors at Chatto a bad name, and it makes it hard to know when the jokes are intentional. Even the chapter-headings are uneasily ambiguous. One is called 'The Mummy and Beef, Egyptian style': happily this is the only mention of beef in the book. Another is called, more startlingly, 'The Disappearance of Mummy'. This proves to be a truly revolting account of the collection and sale of a wildly popular 16th-century remedy made from the 'exudate' of embalmed bodies.

Le Guerer gets rather carried away with remedies. She gives a recipe for 'weasel powder' which involves catching your weasel, then enraging, slaughtering, simmering and drying it, by which time, she has to admit, it has no smell at all. She is on safer, smellier ground when writing about bubonic plague. This terrible killer was, she says, widely believed to be the product of infected air, a demonic emanation risen from the underworld to destroy the earth, whose stench repulsed even vultures.

In Paris, epidemics tended to begin in the area of Montfaucon, where 'the loathsome fetor of sewer catchments' mingled with the 'disgusting sea of pus' which was the slaughterhouse, presided over by the knacker himself, 'areek with the odor of his victims, dirty, cynical, obscene, ill-mannered and rowdy'.

There were two aromatic ways of countering this kind of infection, defence and attack. Mixtures and infusions of flowers and herbs have always been the basis of both curative and preventive medicine. In London, as recalled by every child who sings 'Ring-a-ring o'roses', the healthy habitually carried sweet-smelling posies to ward off infection. Unable to avoid the risk in the course of his duties, a plague doctor would advance backwards on his patient, waving burning branches of fragrant herbs and encouraging him to lance his own sores. Some people preferred aversion therapy, and chose to install a dead dog or a goat in their homes on the principle that not even a plaguey miasma could co-exist with it. Kinder to themselves, the Andean healers believed in strengthening themselves against infectious breath by fortifying their own with alcohol and tobacco.

The seductive appeal of scent is easily proved. A female butterfly can attract suitors by her mysterious, alluring aroma from as far away as can a labrador bitch, though, happily, she emits a different smell. These 'odorous bodily secretions' are known as pheromones and they trigger sexual attraction in many species, including insects, fish, salamanders and snakes. A boar's breath is amazingly rich in pheromones. Redolent of musk and urine, it can be bought in aerosol cans, (generally by pig-breeders), and is said to linger around deeply-buried truffles, which explains the unusual eagerness of sows to dig for them. When lemurs do battle, the smelliest wins and the effect on the loser is 'castrative', and probably catastrophic.

Amongst humans, pheromones are less easily identified. A comic experiment in which volunteers were invited to savour underarm sweat, before assessing the attractiveness of a series of photographs, suggests that the source of sensual delight is less conventionally fragrant than most of us would like to admit. According to one Auguste Galopin, the thrills of foot-fetishism are rooted in forbidden olfactory pleasures. In France there is already a perfume available containing pheromones. It carries a warning that anyone within nine and a half metres of the wearer is likely to be seduced, and the package includes emergency instructions as to what to do should the resultant enthusiasm prove unmanageable.

Annick Le Guerer is a philosophy graduate. She cannot resist snuffling about amongst the great philosophers, nosing out their views on her subject. The pickings are not rich. Most of them have little to say, but Kant and Hegel are the most dismissive, Hegel because the position of the nose on the face is so ambivalent, coming as it does between the intellectual forehead and the gluttonous mouth. The moral status of smells confounds them all, as witness Rousseau's anxious observation: 'I do not know whether to congratulate or to pity the prudent and unfeeling man who has never thrilled to the scent of flowers on his mistress's bosom.' What a dilemma.

The most interesting aspect of this book is its discussion of the great smells of history. They range from the widely documented but still elusively indefinable odour of Sanctity to the famous, specific perfumes of myrrh, spikenard and nenuphar. Ambergris, the waxy alimentary secretion of a sperm-whale, has always been, as you might imagine, pricey. The same is true of bezoar, a concretion from the gut of camels and giraffes, and even more so of castoreum, which is made from the dried perineal glands of a beaver. (Who on earth first thought of distilling perfume from such unpromising materials? Was he related to the first eater of an artichoke?)

My favourite is camphor, an essential oil that worked miracles in the last century. A two-year-old was cured of rickets by smoking a camphor cigarette daily after lunch, camphorated alcohol could always revive the muscles if applied with a sponge rather than quaffed, and we all know what camphorated oil did for John Brown's body. Less well-known is the purpose of camphor-powder. Strategically sprinkled, it can cause 'erotic spasms to subside . . . restoring calm to the body and modesty to the mind'. But could it defeat a pheromone?

(Photograph omitted)