The Sensational Past: How The Enlightenment Changed The Way We Use Our Senses

Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century they made perfect sense.As Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. Using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life, she demonstrates that, even though we may all be human, over time-even in the same culture-we have used our senses in very different ways. In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence.