The Sunday Read: ‘The Woman Who Could Smell Parkinson’s’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Les Milne was a consultant anesthesiologist, and his wife, Joy, typically found that he came home smelling of anesthetics, antiseptics and blood. But he returned one August evening in 1982, shortly after his 32nd birthday, smelling of something new and distinctly unsavory, of some thick must. From then on, the odor never ceased, though neither Les nor almost anyone but his wife could detect it. For Joy, even a small shift in her husband’s aroma might have been cause for distress, but his scent now seemed to have changed fundamentally, as if replaced by that of someone else. Les began to change in other ways, however, and soon the smell came to seem almost trivial. It was as if his personality had shifted. Les had rather suddenly become detached, ill-tempered, apathetic. It was not until much later that he would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The scent Joy had noticed would become a possible solution for earlier diagnosis.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Smell is a powerful sensory capability.
0:05.0	It's the most evocative sense we have,
0:07.0	the one most bound up with memory.
0:09.0	And we and other animals use it to do some really remarkable stuff.
0:15.0	All sorts of species, fish, birds, probably elephants, rely on smell to guide them on their great migrations, for example. Rats can sniff out landmines. And yet, of our various
0:28.6	senses, smell is also the one that we tend to neglect. We treat it as if it were a little bit
0:34.4	primitive, sort of childish, or generally unserious. You might say we look down our
0:40.9	noses at smell.
0:43.7	And so when a woman in Scotland realized that she could actually smell Parkinson's disease,
0:49.8	that the illness itself gave off what was to her this intense musty oily odor and gave it off years
0:57.1	before a diagnosis.
0:59.4	It took a little while before doctors and scientists really began to listen.
1:05.0	My name is Scott Sayer, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
1:10.0	For a recent piece, I spent a bunch of time with Joy Milne, a Scottish for Tyree with a really extraordinary nose,
1:18.0	and you'll hear about her in this week's Sunday Reed.
1:22.0	Joy's always been a hyper-osmic,
1:25.0	or what's maybe better known as a super-smeller.
1:28.0	She actually makes serious adaptations to her life
1:31.0	in order to avoid certain sense.
1:33.0	She'll only drink water that comes from a spring, for instance.
1:36.0	She changes sidewalks to avoid the stink of men's spray deodorant, which she particularly detests.
1:43.7	So one day many years ago, Joy caught a whiff of something new on her husband.
	...

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