Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Ria Elena. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, thank you for listening to this edition of Inside Health. I hope you enjoy it. This is the BBC.

Welcome to a new series of Inside Health. Over the next three months, we'll be turning our forensic eye to all things evidence-based in healthcare.

From the return of rickets, the so-called English disease, to how computers are improving prosthetic limbs.

But today, in keeping with the festive season, we start with a riddle.

What do you think links these three?

Hi, it's in now.

We're in the esophagus, the food pipe now. Just breathe. You all right, Mark?

Some dogs, Beethoven's fifth, and me having an endoscopy. Well, the link, oddly, is smell, specifically the smell of diseases like cancer.

And if it's not clear why, don't worry.

All will be revealed over the next half hour.

And like all good stories, this one starts way back in the mists of time.

The ancients, and perhaps the most commonly known ancient would be Hippocrates,

discuss the use of smell in detecting disease.

Professor Hugh Barr is a surgeon with a special interest in how smells might aid diagnosis,

something he shares with the father of modern medicine.

They cultivated an art of understanding what certain diseases smelt like, and they were able, therefore,

to say to people whether they had a certain type of infection or another type of infection.

In fact, he made a very good insight for tuberculosis, because tuberculosis was a big problem in those days, and there

were other infections that gave you a cough and sputum, and Hippocrates said that if you heated the

sputum, in fact, if you cast it on hot coals, and it liberated a particular smell, then the patient

would die, and it was usually TB.

That insight has informed how we detect the volatile from TB in the 21st century.

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