by the Hospital Senses Collective
A simple bar of soap carries meaning. It simultaneously represents the civilising act of cleaning and evokes the halcyon days of yore. The coal tar smell of carbolic soap in particular, immerses people in the wards, corridors, and laundry rooms of twentieth-century healthcare institutions. It transports people back to the clinical and working experiences of their youth. Inhabitants of the hospital, whether recuperating after childbirth, undergoing treatment for illness, or labouring to maintain the spaces and systems of hospital care, became habituated to its coal tar smell. After it was first mass-produced in 1894, carbolic soap quickly became a ubiquitous presence in domestic settings and public institutions. Phased out of hospital use in the 1970s, for many British people it is now linked to a post-war time that carries nostalgic associations.
It is a lost, forgotten or endangered scent. Carbolic soap is now harder to find, available in Britain only online or in occasional or specialist stores designed to preserve certain elements of past working and domestic life. Devotees seek it out, searching for the odour of their past. It offers them an opportunity to return to days spent as patients, nurses, laundry maids, and cleaners. In these troubled times of health service collapse, the smell of carbolic soap also offers a retreat. It is an astringent balm to soothe the anxieties of contemporary society. The post-war British hospital manifested order, cleanliness, and care, an NHS fit for purpose before reorganisation, bureaucracy, neoliberalism and austerity. A time when Matron ruled the ward, nurses wore starched uniforms, and hospitals offered state- funded sanctuary. After all, smell is a memory aid. One whiff can transport us back to memories we didn’t even know we still held.
Mildly antiseptic with an acrid smell, the strong scent of carbolic soap is indicative of its cleansing power. Advocates of carbolic soap today promote these abrasive qualities. It smells “more clean” than other soaps. What makes something smell clean? Is there some quality in the odour itself, or is it all in the associations? In the case of the hospital and carbolic soap, the stronger the smell, the cleaner the body, floor, or fabric. Rather than masking body or household odour, fans of carbolic soap claim it eradicates them, replacing one kind of unpleasantness with another. It stings the skin and chafes the hands. It is a soap of hard labour, old-fashioned values, moral certitude, stoicism, and British national identity.
This association between soap smells and British identity is partly because, from the late nineteenth century, soap was appropriated to emphasise a perceived cultural superiority. The British exported soap to their colonies as part of their civilising mission; cleanliness was akin to godliness. Mid-century newspapers termed television dramas set in hospitals “Carbolic Soap Operas”. To associate the smell of carbolic soap with the hospital is to suggest something peculiarly civilising and thus something peculiarly British about these public healthcare institutions.
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