“I have recently encountered [...] a gifted man who sustained a head injury, severely damaging his olfactory tracts [...] and, in consequence, entirely losing his sense of smell. He has been startled and distressed at the effects of this: “Sense of smell?” he says. “I never gave it a thought. You don’t normally give it a thought. But when I lost it – it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savor – one doesn’t realize how much ‘savor’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring – maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer”.