Smell and expanding historical research with Dr William Tullett

Sensory historian Dr William Tullett joins Bryony Armstrong to discuss:

• Using smell to engage with the present
• The impact of smell research on political choices and environmental justice
• Using smell to learn about historical experience
• Changing up the hierarchies of senses and historical sources
• Why we need to tackle myths about “bad smells” 
• Why connecting with heritage matters
• The impact of the humanities on other disciplines
• What you can really do when you study history
• The point of humanities in Covid-19 research

Content warning: this episode contains some discussion about racism.

Credit notes:

• Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 'Scratch-and-sniff Palestine: How olfaction shapes nonsovereign infrastructural spaces': https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02637758221118572
• Alex Rhys-Taylor, Food and Multiculture: A Sensory Ethnography of East London: https://www.routledge.com/Food-and-Multiculture-A-Sensory-Ethnography-of-East-London/Rhys-Taylor/p/book/9781472581150
• Sentimental Garbage: Costume Dramas with Dr Emma Southon: https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/costume-dramas-with-dr-emma-southon/id1444729607?i=1000566596029
• The artist mentioned is named Michael Pinsky: https://www.capefarewell.com/pollution-pods/

Find Bryony @BF_Armstrong
Find William @WillTullett

Artwork: Riduwan Molla https://www.canva.com/p/riduwanmolla/
Music: Madaan Mansij https://www.pond5.com/artist/mansij_tubescreamer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

Transcript

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Bryony Armstrong: 0:04

Hello, and welcome to 'What's the Point?' the podcast where we discuss the need for Arts and Humanities today. I'm your host, Bryony Armstrong. We're living in a time when the Arts and Humanities are under threat, and I know this firsthand, having studied both English and maths at university, and now doing a PhD in English. Each week, I'll be joined by a guest talk about what Arts and Humanities do for the world. If you've ever wondered, what's the point of the Arts and Humanities, this is the podcast. Hello, everyone, we're back for another episode, and I'm joined today by Dr. William Tullet, Associate Professor in Sensory History at Anglia Ruskin University, particularly researching the senses of smell and sound. William is currently part of a research team working on Odeuropa, a massive project bringing together historians, artificial intelligence experts, chemists, and perfumers to bring historic smells back to life, and create an archive of European smells from the 16th century to the early 20th century. So let's get into the episode. How did you come to choose a humanities subject?

William Tullett: 1:27

Well, I ended up choosing to study history undergraduate, and then an MA in 18th century studies, and then a PhD in history. Because I've always really been really, really interested in the past, I've been really, really interested in...in history as a topic. I was one of those people who...I was going to say dragged, but actually quite willingly...went around lots of museums as a child. My Dad was very interested in military history, so those museums often involve tanks. But, you know, I think that inspired a real interest in the past. I grew up initially in Oxfordshire, surrounded by lots of interesting historical stuff. And particularly lots of kind of very old villages, which I always found really fascinating. And I was also, you know, as a sixth former, very interested in politics as well. And I actually started my BA degree as a history and politics student, because I thought that politics, I think, was possibly more vocational than history as a subject, which turned out to be absolutely wrong. And I ended up dropping politics after the first year, partly because I found it deadly dull, but also because I discovered early modern cultural history, and all these people using anthropological methods, you know, all this great stuff about witchcraft and mad 16th century peasants who became fascinated with the idea that the universe was a cheese and angels were worms, you know, all of this fantastic writing, you know, these amazing, imaginary places the early modern people thought about. And so I thought, yeah, that's for me, that sounds great. And so kind of switched over to just doing history. But I also think more generally, I've ended up keeping on studying the humanities, because I think that humanities is political. Everything is political. But the humanities have a kind of a critical political role to play, one that's often maligned in the current context, by the government and the right wing press. But, you know, I think it provides us a crucial critical lens, not just on the past, but on the present, and also for our future as well.

Bryony Armstrong: 3:40

I absolutely agree. I mean, I think about this all the time, that there's not really an incentive for a political ruling class to advocate for the study of humanities, as you say, because they have a critical role in questioning the society we live in. So I think this is kind of part of what feeds into, like, the alignment of humanities, especially in the current political climate today. I have to say, also, I grew up with a very Military History fan Dad. So probably, we ended up going to similar museums with tanks and things. And I think it's quite a common story to...for people to choose the humanities, but maybe keep something in the wings that they think might possibly be more vocational. So for me, that was maths. And as you say, it actually turns out not really to be the case. And we find, studying humanities, that they are so applicable and relevant to real life. So, you research smell, and I came across your work when I listened to you give a talk that you really aptly titled, Why humanities scholars have to wake up and smell the coffee. But it's not just humanities researchers, I think, that need to wake up and smell the coffee. So can you maybe tell us a bit about...sort of...the implications that smell has for everyone, especially in relation to maybe some of the big issues that we're facing today?

Unknown: 4:57

Yeah, so I think that one of the things that's really pushed smell into people's consciousness in the very, very recent past is of course COVID-19, because it forced a lot of people to experience what life was like, both without the sense of smell, but also with a heavily distorted sense of smell. So we talk a lot about anosmia, but a lot of people were were suffering from parosmia and other conditions as well as their as their COVID infection developed, which really meant that foul things smell nice and fragrant things smell horrible. So I think, you know, one thing that that revealed to a lot of people is that smell is really crucial to our everyday wellbeing. It's crucial to how we eat, it's crucial to how we relate to our environment. And for that reason, it's really important. And the environment really takes us on to a kind of second plank about why smell is so crucial, I think, and that's that it provides an important connecting point with our environment. One of the problems with our current engagement with smell, I would suggest is that we tend to not attend to the smells around us, we don't pay attention to them. So the kind of...often we notice, for example, when we come back from holiday, that our house or our flat or wherever we live...shed...dung heap...has a particular smell. And that's because we got used to it over time, we didn't notice it before. But when you reenter a space for a long time, you realize it has a distinct smell. And so we often tend to only attend to smells when they're unusual, and they're out of place. But actually, there's loads of amazing smells all around us that, you know, that are crucial to everyday life. And lots of those are connected to nature. Smell provides us with a kind of wonderful way, both of connecting with the natural world, you know, whether that's kind of the smells of...of rivers, or plants or even animals. But also, it provides us a warning sign when things are going wrong. In our in our natural world, when smells are kind of out of place, whether that's the smell of, of pollution, you know, the smell of kind of, of rotting and death, or whether that's even the fact that we can observe the issues that other species are facing with their sense of smell. So the good example, there is, of course, bees, who, for various reasons that are bound up with the use of pesticides and pollution, are now very confused in their smelling often and can't find pollen because their own sense of smell has been wrapped by pollution, or because the plants that would normally I guide them to that pollen have lost some of their odors because of the impact of pollution on the plants themselves. So I think smell's a really interesting way of engaging with our natural world and forces us to pay attention. And I think that paying attention is really crucial. Because the world that we currently live in is a kind of one that's heavily invested in economic growth. And of projecting that growth into the future. And smell isn't about growth. It's not about necessarily always projecting things into the future. It's often a tool for simply being present, with the things around us. Getting to know things around us, getting to understand things around us, rather than optimistically projecting numbers...figures...into a kind of horrible economic dystopian future. So, attention. Smell makes us pay attention.

Bryony Armstrong: 8:44

Yeah, that's beautifully put. It's interesting to me hearing you say that, how smell...it can really map as an analogy on to why humanities are important because it's not all about economic growth. And sometimes it is about paying attention to what's going on and being present. And you mentioned there, sort of...bees in our environment. And I remember when I heard you talk, speaking about the tool that smell can be in being something that can convince people of climate change being a problem. And funnily enough, actually, a couple of months later, I was in New Haven in Connecticut, and I saw a sign up, just someone had tacked to a lamppost. It was the New Haven Climate Movement had tacked up there. And it was a poster encouraging people to switch from gas powered lawn mowers to electric lawn mowers. And the slogan said, ah, the smell of fresh cut grass, mixed with nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. And it was just funny to see the things that you had said in the talk kind of play out there in real life and see how smell does convince people, if they're financially able, to make certain choices that map onto the environment.

Unknown: 9:56

Yeah, I think that's a really nice example. But I also think that smell should kind of caution us to think critically, even about kind of the switch, for example, from different types...one type of fuel to another in the in the case of electricity. One of the things I'm really struck with in the scholarship on smell is its awareness, or increasing awareness, of the way in which often we're not getting rid of smells, but we're simply moving them around. And fuel and power was a really nice example of that. So, for example, obviously burning, you know, burning coal, burning wood, burning gas, you know, petrol, those kinds of fuels, you're immediately getting a sense of how bad they smell, right? Because they're in your lawnmower, or car or kitchen, or whatever. So the smell is having an immediate impact on you. The difference...the difference with electricity, is that that electricity has to be generated...is often still generated by coal fired power stations, and those coal fired power stations are having a really negative polluting impact on the people that live near them. So what's happening is you're moving the smell of pollution around, and that in itself is a kind of problem, because the spaces and places to which that pollution is being moved, are often, you know, in poor areas, they're in areas of where large numbers of ethnic minorities live, or they're located in the Global South. And that's a real problem and one that we should be aware of. And so when I talk about how, you know, smell can be a useful tool in making policymakers aware of the impacts of pollution, climate change, the way we generate our energy, really, it's twofold, way. The first is to force people to confront the fact that so many of the production processes that we rely on every day, whether that's fuel, whether that's the making of things like paper, and cardboard, which are really polluting, smelly industries that are particularly located in the south of the US, these industries will have a really negative impact on people's smell. Just not our white middle class noses, because they're located far away from them. And the second way in, which it's really important is because we've become habituated to the smells that are around us, we've already kind of talked about how, you know, when you go on holiday, you come back from holiday, you realize your house has a smell that you didn't realize was there before. And that's because before you were habituated to that odor. And the same applies to pollution, we kind of get used to the smell of of car exhausts and stuff to a significant extent, we've learned to live with it. And I think humanities scholars have a lot to learn from artists who have worked with smell and a really good example of that is Thomas Pinsky is pollution pods, artwork, which is effectively five kind of domes that you can walk into and smell the pollution of five different cities smells like. And what that does is it forces people to pay attention. It forces a confrontation with the smells of your environment that people might have got used to. And I think that's a really powerful tool.

Bryony Armstrong: 13:19

Fascinating. It really is a wake up and smell the coffee moment, definitely. And much like reading, I think...talking about what humanities has to learn from art...reading literature, smelling something, it does force you to have empathy, which is very powerful, and something that I think is very necessary to study. But so we talked about smell in the present...things that we need to smell going on now. But let's talk a bit about smell in the past because this is sort of your wheelhouse. So you're currently creating a massive archive of smells from European history. So why is it important that we preserve certain smells from our past?

Unknown: 14:00

I think it's important to preserve the smells of the past, because they have played a central role in people's daily experience. And if you're a humanities scholar, whether that's you know, English literature, or history, or art history or any kind of discipline that's interested in the past, I think one of the things that you're fundamentally interested in is, what was it like for people in the past? What did it feel like to be in the past? You know, what was the daily experience of people who lived in past places and times? And smell is a really potent way of thinking about that. But it's often something that's been ignored in history and in other humanities disciplines. Because those disciplines have been dominated by a focus on texts, rather than you know, for example, objects or other sources. Secondly, because it's been held that it's kind of difficult to archive smells...like, smells escape from bottles very easily, they degrade over time, why should we build an archive of actual smells? So the evidence is lacking for the physical smells. But also, thirdly, because there's always been a hierarchy of what's most important. And I...and smells come at the bottom of that hierarchy. Whereas other subjects like politics have always been at the top. I had a discussion recently, with a...I'll say slightly hostile history scholar, and their postdoc, and their postdoc said, oh, smell, that's a very fashionable topic. And they worked on politics. And I said, Well, you know, politics has had a good 300 years to be the kind of top dog so I think it's probably time to try something new. And what that means is that there's just so much to do, smell is everywhere in all of our sources. It's kind of, in a way, easy pickings, in that there's lots out there, then lots of it hasn't been discovered or looked at. So it's also an interesting thing to do, because it just hasn't been done. And yeah, it's central to our daily lives. And I think by engaging with the smells of the past, we...we bust some pretty pernicious myths about what the past smelled like that are really problematic. The key one being that the past smelled horrible. And that's part of the kind of narrative that we see in loads and loads of different cultural and social contexts, whether that's kind of, you know, Monty Python with kind of peasants that are just mired in filth, you know, or whether that's the idea that less progressive or civilized societies are dirtier and therefore smell worse. And actually, that's just simply not the case! People in the past were really attentive to the sense of smell, were really worried about smells, and did their level best to try and either get rid of bad smells, or cover them up or combat them with more fragrant smells. So I think kind of attacking that myth of, you know, a civilized place is a less smelly place...the past is less civilized. Therefore, the past smells are really important. Because it fits onto all kinds of contemporary issues as well. So I was reading a great piece the other day about Palestine. It was an ethnography looking at how people dealt with waste in the West Bank. And one of the things that they talked about was how Palestinians are very keen to show that they recognize the really bad sewage issues, and sanitary issues in the West Bank, because it's important for them to show to charities and Non-Governmental Organizations, that they don't want to live like this, and that they're not, kind of, mired in their own filth and perfectly happy about it. So there's a kind of politics to that's still with us today.

Bryony Armstrong: 18:07

Yeah, there's huge implications for it. That...that reminds me actually, I was recently listening to another podcast that I love, Sentimental Garbage. I can't remember the name of the historian, and I'll have to put it in the show notes so I can credit her properly, but she was talking about, again, smell in the past, and this misconception that the past smelled terrible. And she said, well, a lot of the evidence that we have of, for example, sewage running through the streets is from people complaining about it to the council and written text. So it's not that the past smelled bad all the time, it's that people were trying to make it not smell bad when bad things occurred.

Unknown: 18:44

Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And one of the problems you have to deal with if you're a humanities scholar looking at smell in the past is the fact that people will often only talk about smells when there's a problem. And that means inevitably, you're going to get loads of bad smells. But once we kind of rootle around a bit and look at different sources, you begin to discover that there are more fragrant smells out there, and attempts to deal with those bad smells as well. And I think it's a nice example of how, you know, our focus on one type of source, or one type of data can really distort our understanding of a problem. And I think that, in itself, is a lesson that's very relevant for today. You know, you can...you can make something look like a problem if you focus on a particular set of data. And, and indeed, the current government loves to do stuff like that.

Bryony Armstrong: 19:40

Wow, that's very true. I hadn't thought about that. As somebody who researches touch as well, I definitely also am coming into a research area that sort of traditionally been seen lower on the sensory hierarchy compared to sight and sound and have also occasionally come up against a bit of hostility for that being, quote unquote, fashionable! So I definitely relate, and definitely...sort of...trying to expand, I think, the breadth of what we look at. And the kinds of things that we consider important,

Unknown: 20:11

I think also, you know, we...I think one of the issues with the humanities at the moment is obviously, it's under attack. And that's...that's an equality and diversity issue, and something we might talk about later on. But, you know, one of the responses to that is to say the humanities is for everybody. And so we should try and provide the maximum opportunity to get the maximum number of people involved in the humanities. And that often means going beyond texts, it means involving all of the senses in our inquiry, and encouraging people to engage all of their senses, when they think about the past, whether that's getting them to smell things, getting them to touch either original artifacts, or 3D replicas in museums, you know, this kind of stuff is really important to kind of widening access, I think, to the humanities, particularly, you know, in a...in a period when we are far more cognizant of neurodiversity, and the kind of different forms of sensory skills that people may bring to their engagement with the past, beyond those that have typically been talked about, as neurotypical.

Bryony Armstrong: 21:22

Absolutely. I mean, I really want to use this podcast kind of to shout from the rooftops that getting rid of the humanities, or at least slashing funding to the humanities, is a huge equality, diversity and inclusion issue. And we need every voice in humanities, every voice represented to have a breadth of research to topics that affect different people in different ways. So thank you for speaking to that there. So this project, it aims to bring people across Europe closer to their olfactory heritage. And you've spoken about this a little bit, but just wanted to talk about, like, why...why do you think it is that we as people need to get in touch with our heritage?

Unknown: 22:02

I think heritage is important to people because it gives their lives meaning. It gives them a sense of place, a sense of community, a sense of belonging. And that is...is really important. And I think also, it's important, because it's about what the past means to people, to normal people. On an everyday level, it's about...heritage is about how people value the past and place value on their understanding of the past or knowledge of the past, or the past's role in the present. And I think actually, that last point about the past role in the present is really crucial, because our, kind of, olfactory heritage, if you like, is around us every day and informs our daily experience. So heritage is really about the present, and future as well as the past. And our current responses to smells, our current engagement with smells often have a really long history that goes back even centuries. And a good example of that is the smell of Wintergreen, which is a scent that in the US in the 1960s, they did some experiments, and similar experiments in 1960s in the UK, and they wanted to know which smells are the nicest, and which smells are the most disgusting for people in these two countries. Turns out wintergreen was among one of the nicest smells in the US. And that's because it was a scent that was often included in candy, in sweets. In the UK, wintergreen was voted overwhelmingly as a very unpleasant smell. And that's because it was a scent that was associated with medicine, and with dressings for wounds. And so this one smell had very, very different kind of histories that directly informed people's kind of contemporary consumer behavior and their response to those smells because of the uses they have been put to in the past. And there are so many examples of that, not just for smell, but also for the other senses as well. You know, there's there's a great sociologist at Goldsmiths, who did a fantastic book on...it was an ethnography of the East End through the senses. And one of the things that he looked at was the taste of katsu curry. And today, you can go to the city's square mile and you can find a stand that sells Halal chicken katsu wraps, so this kind of way of fusion cuisine. But the popularity of that is...and the taste for that food is explainable by a series of historical circumstances that include the serving of powdered curries on early P and O ferries, the integration of chicken into Japanese cuisine actually from Europe, and then back into Europe. again. So all of these shifts have created the tastes that we have today. You know, and we could go on and on and give examples for the other senses as well. But I think that's why heritage and our sensory heritage matters, because it still has a huge impact on our way we use our senses in the present.

Bryony Armstrong: 25:21

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it...as you're touching on here, the smells that you can archive, and the things we smell now, do connect to colonial pasts, which again, I think connects to that idea that we need a bigger breadth of opinion and ideas in humanities that in...in the UK, at least, historically, ethnic minorities have been kept out of studying humanities at university. But clearly, it's...it's something that we need more, more people in if we want to start studying our colonial past too.

Unknown: 25:58

to the Americas, in the in the late 16th, and 17th century, in particular, you know, they really relied actually on Indigenous olfactory knowledge, the Indigenous nose, to be able to find out about various medicine,s to be able to find out about commodities that they could then sell back in Europe. But then that knowledge has kind of been hidden by subsequent kind of histories that haven't really been interested in the sense of smell. And at the same time, there were kind of hierarchies...that hierarchy of the senses we already talked about, that's often dismissed the sense of smell has always been closely mapped on, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, onto racial and ethnic hierarchies. And that's a twofold thing, really. One is the idea that non-white non-European people are closer to animals, and therefore, have a more animal-like sense of smell that is more sensitive. Whereas, you know, the white European is the man...the man...always the man of vision and eyesight, and rationality. And this is something that's really clearly expressed by a guy called Lorenz Oken in 1847, in a book where he explicitly maps out this hierarchy. But there's a kind of second element to that, which is that, and this comes back to the kind of the myth about less civilized people being smellier. You know, it's not just that supposedly, non-white, non-European people have a more sensitive sense of smell. They're also always described as smellier. And...and that kind of relationship between smell, and hierarch,y is kind of so consistent, whether that's women smell worse than men, that working classes smell worse than the middle and upper classes. But it also applies to kind of racial hierarchies as well. And, you know, academia, and the humanities, has traditionally always been a very white, male, middle and upper class profession. And for all of those reasons, it's often been very deodorized. The classic example being that when one goes to the archives, when one goes to the British Library, you know, the British Library kicks people out if they have really, really...if they're really smelly, if they get complaints from other readers.

Bryony Armstrong: 28:31

Yeah, I remember you speaking about that in in the talk you gave. And yeah, I was also just thinking that while you were speaking, that I definitely want to speak to that question of non-institutionalized knowledge and knowledge that hasn't existed in universities that do relate to the humanities, that...that is important and has equal weight. So an example that you've been giving is medicine and particularly in Indigenous communities, and knowledge that isn't currently, sort of, institutionalized within certain medical areas in Western society. That also just reminded me to think of smell that this weekend, just this weekend, I was at the Surgeon's Hall Museum in Edinburgh. And I don't know if you happen to have been there, but they have sort of like box that you...you smell in, and then you try to guess what's in there, and it tells you about the different medical properties of the...it might be cinnamon or something. And it just...yeah, I really enjoyed doing that at the weekend. And it totally speaks to your point that the past's role is in the present and the things that we smell now can tell us a lot about the healing properties of certain things that might now be

Unknown: 29:46

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I just wanted to overlooked. actually to come back to your point about how the humanities can have a kind of really wide impact across lots of disciplines, because I think if you're going to study the humanities, you know, particularly history, but any humanities discipline, one of the things you have to realize is that what makes the humanities great is that you end up studying absolutely everything. You can...you can have a history of anything, right? And I think history of smell kind of proves that. But, you know, you can have history of medicine, you can have history of science, you can have history of maths, should you, say, wish to go down that route. I wouldn't be one of those people, but you know, each their own! And I think, often, students at GCSE or A level, for example, don't realize that they don't, you know...they're so acclimatized to a particular view of history, that's about politics, that's about Kings and Queens, there might be a bit of social history in there, but it's often again, heavily freighted towards, kind of, chartism, and politics or kind of, you know, the social life of the court under the Tudors, or something. And, you know, history of smell is one of those things...is trying to challenge that focus. But there are loads of other kinds of areas that are now really common in humanities degrees at university that cover the whole breadth of life, of society and culture. And I...and I think I really want to impress that, because I think it's really important for people to understand that, you know, if you come and do history, you won't just be learning about Henry the Eighth, not least because I refuse to teach that!

Bryony Armstrong: 31:29

Thank you, thank you for speaking to that. I mean, I research kissing, so I think that really is proof that you can you can research anything! And it's so true. I mean, if you...if you are somebody listening who may be as a GCSE or an A level student, and you have some ideas about history, or a different humanities subject, but you haven't seen that represented anywhere, it doesn't mean that it's not an important topic, it probably just means that nobody's thought about it yet, or nobody's yet taken it to a certain level. And you're right, you really can research anything within the humanities. And there will be opportunities to do that. So thank you for speaking to that. So just a question to round off now. And you've touched a bit on this earlier. But I'm fascinated by the fact that COVID-19 has shown us how important smell is. And, as I said, I research touch. So I definitely have found that as well with lack of touch that people had during COVID. It really changed the way I saw my research about kissing. But COVID...it obviously initiated a lot of necessary and very admirable research within medical and epidemiological fields. But I wanted to just end by asking you a bit about your thoughts on the place of humanities research in all of this. I can't, for the life of me, find this person. I'm desperate to. So if anyone out there saw this tweet, please tell me! But I saw an epidemiologist tweet during the first sort of shelter-in-place order in the UK, saying, I'm an epidemiologist, and I've been essentially preparing for this moment, my whole life, but now it's come down to it, all I can think about is the human element. And I'm desperate to interview that person, so if anyone knows who they are, please tell me. But yeah, so I just wanted to hear your thoughts about, sort of, where humanities comes in here?

Unknown: 33:16

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the humanities is kind of crucial to kind of addressing these big crises in a whole series of different ways. I think the first element of that is that all of this is about behavior. It's about the way humans behave. And it's the way that the way humans relate to each other. And the way that humans relate to each other is...is very much bound up with social and cultural themes that have a really long history, right? And we have to understand that history, understand that context, if we're going to understand how people are likely to behave when they're told, for example, to isolate, or to go into lockdown, and to only go to go out to exercise once a day or whatever. So I think the humanities is about humans. And medicine deals with bodies. So we have to add the humans to the bodies to really make sense of this stuff. I think the second example where the humanities really matter comes back to often the type of data that's been collected. So, for example, with anosmia, there was hugely impressive scientific research done on anosmia as a result of COVID. Massive amounts of material. Huge, quantitative, largely quantitative surveys of people who have suffered from anosmia as a result COVID by various groups of researchers across the globe. However, I was talking to somebody who's involved with a major anosmia charity the other day, and they said to me, the problem is we didn't really collect enough qualitative information. So we have all of this information about, like, the kind of very basics about when people started to experience anosmia, and how long it lasted for. That kind of stuff. We have very, very little information about how it felt for people, how does it feel to experience anosmia? What is that actually? Like, how would you describe it? How would you represent it to another person? Right? And that's where the humanities come comes in. Because the humanities is, again, is about feeling, it's about experience. It's about how people actually respond to these kinds of, for example, medical conditions. So I think in that sense that the humanities has a...has a really important role to play. And thirdly, a final kind of point is that I think we used to always be told as historians, or at least, you know, I was always told as a BA history student, that we shouldn't use the past... the past, you know, just to inform what we're doing the present, right? The past is not just a repository of lessons we're thinking about the present. But actually, I think that's completely and utterly wrong. Because, in a sense that, you know, past experience is probably the closest we're going to get in terms of lessons about how to react to this kind of stuff. And so I think the past does provide, you know, a huge variety of evidence that we can draw on, both to explain the kind of human reaction to these big challenges, like COVID, but also to proffer advice on how to deal with the aftermath. And so I think humanities are crucial to that process of rebuilding after major crises, right? Whether that's, kind of, gargantuan floods of the sort that we're now seeing, you know, outside Europe, or whether that's large disease outbreaks or famines, or whatever. These things have happened in the past. And we can learn a lot from the past about how to, kind of, rebuild after them and plan for the future because there's always options, no matter how inevitable certain policies may be described as by governments. There are always choices to be made. And the humanities provides evidence for making those choices.

Bryony Armstrong: 37:22

That's a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on What's the Point.

William Tullett: 37:27

Thanks for having me. It's been fun!

Bryony Armstrong: 37:31

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