For most neurologists, the sense of smell is not a topic of polite conversation—it is hard to assess, and even harder to understand. They know that is it vulnerable in head injury and (perhaps) that it departs early in Parkinson’s disease. It has a walk-on part in epilepsy courtesy of uncinate fits, and everyone knows about Proust’s madeleine. Most neurology wards will somewhere have an ancient collection of bottles containing unspeakable substances, produced when someone remembers to test the first cranial nerve (or should that be the fifth?). We are visual and verbal primates, …