Old Joan and the sniff test
Joan of Arc’s relics exposed as forgery
…Odour analysis is a new technique for palaeopathology, but Charlier says that he hit on the idea after being struck by the variety of odours of other historical corpses. Delacourte and Duriez sniffed the relics and nine other samples of bone and hair from Charlier’s lab without being told what the samples were. They were also not allowed to confer. Both smelled hints of ‘burnt plaster’ and ‘vanilla’ in the samples from the relics.
The plaster smell was consistent with the fact that Joan of Arc was burnt on a plaster stake, not a wooden one, to make the whole macabre spectacle last longer. But vanilla is inconsistent with cremation. “Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body,” says Charlier. “You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt.”
So says an April 4, 2007 article in Nature. The Associated Press has a photo of Dr. Charlier holding some of the remains in a test tube.
Dr. Charlier’s research bears great, little, or no relationship to either of the following.
(1) The study “Helping Behavior Commitments in the Presence of Odors: Vanilla, Lavender, and No Odor,” by Mary Beth Grimes of Georgia Southern University.
(2) The smell jars of the Stasi:
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many astounding revelations came to light about the Stasi, the East German secret police. One of the more bizarre activities the Stasi was found to have engaged in was the collection of Geruchsproben ? smell samples ? for the benefit of the East German smell hounds. The odors, collected during interrogations using a perforated metal ?smell sample chair? or by breaking into people?s homes and stealing their dirty underwear, were stored in small glass jars. Many of the remaining East German smell jars are on display at the Stasi Museum in Berlin.
(Thanks to investigator Katherine Gleason for bringing Dr. Charlier to our attention. Thanks to Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society for bringing the Stasi jars to our attention.)