A Natural History of the Senses (11 page)

An eighteenth-century woman’s dressing called for elaborate preparations and a discerning nose: She wore sweet-smelling hair powder and scented makeup; her perfumed clothes were kept in an aromatic clothespress; she lavishly perfumed her body, and then soaked cotton pomanders in cologne to tuck into her bodice. Potpourris sat on her tables, scenting the room from their Chinese
porcelain containers (“porcelain” is a word with a fascinating history, which leads back, through cowry shells, to the genitals of a female pig, which is obviously what its silky texture reminded them of). At midday, she changed into a fresh array of aromas equally overwhelming. And then again at evening. Napoleon’s passion for luxury included his favorite cologne water, made of neroli and other ingredients, 162 bottles of which he ordered from his perfumer, Chardin, in 1810. After he washed, he liked to pour cologne over his neck, chest, and shoulders. Even on his most arduous campaigns, in his elaborately decorated tent he took time to choose rose- or violet-scented lotions, gloves, and other finery. During the Napoleonic Wars, British sea captains sent on to the Empress Josephine roses destined for her garden at Malmaison (where she had 250 varieties); couriers with new varieties of roses had immunity passing between England and France. Elizabeth I adored gloves scented with ambergris; she not only wore perfumed cloaks, she required that her courtiers be heavily scented, too, so that they might surround her sweetly when they moved. A patron of the arts, Elizabeth was single-handedly responsible for the glory of the Elizabethan theater and the well-being of many writers, Shakespeare included, and she relished her position at the center of sensory and artistic life. She was particularly fond of Sir Walter Raleigh, and so, it may be assumed, of the strawberry cologne he liked to wear. Elizabeth kept her pets doused in scent, and she wore a pomander (an apple rolled in cinnamon and dressed in cloves) to ward off the plague.

This scent obsession started long before. The first gift to the Christ Child was incense and, in the eleventh century, Edward the Confessor presented Westminster Abbey with a sacred and surprisingly imperishable relic—some of the original frankincense carried by the Magi. In India, the art of
abhyanga
, a musky rubdown of female elephants to increase their sexual attraction to male elephants, still exists. In the ancient courts of Japan, clocks burned a different incense every fifteen minutes, and geishas were paid by the number of scent sticks consumed. Perfumes have obsessed every culture and religion, but the ultimate promise is probably in the Koran: Those religious enough to go to heaven will find there voluptuous
companions called houris (from the Arabic
haurā’
, dark-eyed woman), who will attend to every whim and invent new cravings, which they will then quench. The ultimate font of delights, they are not merely perfumed—according to the Koran, they are made entirely of sandalwood. They are pure smell, pure pleasure. How fitting. In a sense, the houris return us to that time, before thought, before sight, when smell was all we had to guide us down the dimly lit corridors of evolution.

Our skin is a kind of space suit in which we maneuver through an atmosphere of harsh gases, cosmic rays, radiation from the sun, and obstacles of all sorts. Years ago, I read about a boy who had to live in a bubble (designed by NASA) because of the weakness of his immune system and his susceptibility to disease. We are all that boy. The bubble is our skin. But the skin is also alive, breathing and excreting, shielding us from harmful rays and microbial attack, metabolizing vitamin D, insulating us from heat and cold, repairing itself when necessary, regulating blood flow, acting as a frame for our sense of touch, aiding us in sexual attraction, defining our individuality, holding all the thick red jams and jellies inside us where they belong. Not only do we have unique fingerprints, we have unique pore patterns. According to Catholic belief, there is somewhere, protected in a secret vault, the relic foreskin of Christ. Since he ascended to heaven, his foreskin is the only mortal part of him that remains. We like to decorate our skin whenever we get the chance, and that is made easier by skin being portable, washable, and sloughy. Psychiatrist David Hellerstein’s description of skin in
Science Digest
(September 1985) offers a simple, convenient picture of it in cross section:

Our skin is what stands between us and the world. If you think about it, no other part of us makes contact with something not us but the skin. It imprisons us, but it also gives us individual shape, protects us from invaders, cools us down or heats us up as need be, produces vitamin D, holds in our body fluids. Most amazing, perhaps, is that it can mend itself when necessary, and it is constantly renewing itself. Weighing from six to ten pounds, it’s the largest organ of the body, and the key organ of sexual attraction. Skin can take a startling variety of shapes: claws, spines, hooves, feathers, scales, hair. It’s waterproof, washable, and elastic. Although it may cascade or roam as we grow older, it lasts surprisingly well. For most cultures, it’s the ideal canvas to decorate with paints, tattoos, and jewelry. But, most of all, it harbors the sense of touch.

The fingertips and tongue are much more sensitive than the back. Some parts of the body are ticklish, and others respond when we itch, shiver, or get gooseflesh. The hairiest parts of the body are generally the most sensitive to pressure, because there are many sense receptors at the base of each hair. In animals, from mice to lions, the whiskers around the mouth are extraordinarily sensitive; our body hairs are sensitive, too, but to a lesser degree. The skin is also thinnest where there’s hair. Feeling doesn’t take place in the topmost layer of skin, but in the second layer. The top layer of skin is dead, sloughs off easily, and contributes to that ring around the bathtub. This is why safecrackers are sometimes shown sandpapering their fingertips, making the top layer of skin thinner so that the touch receptors will be closer to the surface. A carpenter looking for rough patches may run a thumb over the plank of wood he has just planed. A cook may roll a bit of dough between a thumb and forefinger to test its consistency. Without having to look at the spot, we know at once where we cut ourself shaving, or where a stocking
is starting to run. It’s entirely possible to feel wet, even though we may not
be
wet (when washing dishes with plastic gloves on, say), which suggests the complex sensations that constitute touch. The reason it’s easier to get our feet wet first when we brave an icy ocean is that there aren’t as many cold receptors in the feet as there are on, for example, the tip of the nose.

In the Middle Ages, so-called witches and others who lived on the outskirts of the law, piety, or convention were burned at the stake. Mimicking the fire and brimstone of hell, it was the ultimate horror. Death would happen cell by cell, receptor by receptor; each of life’s minute sensations would be torched. Today people who have somehow survived accidental burning come to the burn units of metropolitan hospitals to be re-dressed. If their burns are too deep for the body to repair by itself, they receive temporary coverings (cadaver skin, pigskin, lubricated gauze) until doctors can begin grafting skin from other body parts. Our skin makes up about 16 percent of our body weight (about six pounds), and stretches two square yards, but if too much of the body is burned, there isn’t enough skin to graft.

In 1983, a Harvard Medical School team led by Dr. Howard Green found a revolutionary way to repair burned skin. Two small boys, Jamie and Glen Selby, were removing paint from their naked bodies when the solvent accidentally caught fire. Only five and six years old, the boys had burned themselves horrendously, one over 97 percent of his body, the other 98 percent. At the Shriners Burn Institute in Boston, doctors covered the boys with cadaver skin and artificial membrane, removed small squares of skin from their armpits and cultured them into large sheets of skin, which they grafted on gradually over a five-month period. They were able to repair half of the burned areas on each boy’s body, and a little over a year later the boys went home to Casper, Wyoming. Although the boys didn’t have any sweat glands or hair follicles on this skin, it was pliable and protective, and they were able to return to school. The doctors had been able to grow large quantities of new skin.

Here is how it is done: In a Harvard laboratory, doctors cut up a small patch of skin donated by a patient, treat it with enzymes, then spread it thinly onto a culture medium. After only ten days,
colonies of skin cells begin linking up into sheets, which can then be chopped up and used to make further sheets. In twenty-four days, enough skin will be produced to cover an entire human body. The new skin is attached to gauze that has been saturated in Vaseline, then, gauze side up, sutured to the body. About ten days later, the gauze is removed, and the skin soon grows into a surface much smoother and more natural-looking than the rough one a normal skin graft usually leaves. As revolutionary as skin-growing is, other methods are equally intriguing. At New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center, doctors have been experimenting with cadaver skin, which they grow in large quantities and store in a skin bank. At MIT, researchers have developed a high-speed technique that uses a quarter-sized patch of skin from the burn patient to manufacture a large amount of skin in under two hours. A graft can be made right away, without a three-week wait. In two weeks, the burn will be covered with fresh new skin. Again, the skin will lack hair follicles, sweat glands, and pigment, but it will protect and function like normal skin. Such techniques are not for minor burns or even small serious burns; they’re useful only in patients who are severely burned over large areas and therefore have too little skin left for grafting. None of the techniques is without risk—delay; rejection; possible infection—but the very fact of being able to grow an organ, indeed the largest organ in the body, makes one pause to think about growing other organs or at least parts of them—eyes, ears, hearts—in a farm whose fields are pans and whose silos are test tubes.

Language is steeped in metaphors of touch. We call our emotions feelings, and we care most deeply when something “touches” us. Problems can be thorny, ticklish, sticky, or need to be handled with kid gloves. Touchy people, especially if they’re coarse, really get on our nerves.
Noli me tangere
, legal Latin for “don’t meddle or interfere,” translates literally as “Don’t touch me,” and it was what Christ said to Mary Magdalen after the Resurrection. But it’s also one term for the disease lupus, presumably because of the disfiguring
skin ulcerations characteristic of that illness. A toccata in music is a composition for organ or other keyboard instrument in a free style. It was originally a piece intended to show touch technique, and the word comes from the feminine past participle of
toccare
, to touch. Music teachers often chide students for having “no sense of touch,” by which they mean an indefinable delicacy of execution. In fencing, saying
touché
means that you have been touched by the foil and are conceding to your opponent, although, of course, we also say it when we think we have been foiled because someone’s argumentative point is well made. A touchstone is a standard. Originally, touchstones were hard black stones like jasper or basalt, used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streaks they left on the stone with those of an alloy. “The touchstone of an art is its precision,” Ezra Pound once said. D. H. Lawrence’s use of the word touch isn’t epidermal but a profound penetration into the core of someone’s being. So much of twentieth-century popular dancing is simultaneous solo gyration that when people returned to dancing closely with partners again a couple of years ago, we had to call it something different—“touch dancing.” “For a while there, it was touch and go,” we say of a crisis or precarious situation, not realizing that the expression goes back to horse-and-carriage days, when the wheels of two coaches glanced off each other as they passed, but didn’t snag; a modern version would be when two swerving cars brush fenders. What seems real we call “tangible,” as if it were a fruit whose rind we could feel. When we die, loved ones swaddle us in heavily padded coffins, making us infants again, lying in our mother’s arms before returning to the womb of the earth, ceremonially unborn. As Frederick Sachs writes in
The Sciences
, “The first sense to ignite, touch is often the last to burn out: long after our eyes betray us, our hands remain faithful to the world.… in describing such final departures, we often talk of losing touch.”