ABSTRACT
Late eleventh- and early twelfth-century European authors accepted the Galenic-Arabic understanding of olfaction they found in Constantine the African’s translations, particularly those of Haly Abbas and Isaac Israeli. When Aristotle’s texts became available, his assumption that the nose was the sense organ and his argument that odor as a sensible had no physical presence did not displace the Galenic-Arabic theory’s location of the sense organ in the brain or its understanding of odor as physical matter. However, Arabic authors such as Avicenna had incorporated aspects of Aristotle’s theory, such as the mediation of odor in species, into their discussions of olfaction. Albertus Magnus and other scholastic authors developed an account of olfaction that fused more aspects of Aristotle’s theory (primarily a theoretical separation between odor information as matterless species and physical odor as a fume) into the already well-accepted Galenic-Arabic theory. Thirteenth-century olfactory theory became the standard medieval account of smelling. It was changed only in emphasis over time: thirteenth-century authors were particularly interested in the powers of odors to affect the body, while later philosophical texts included more discussion of the mediation of odor in species. Late medieval medicine, however, continued to emphasize the powers of odors on the human body.
