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This reminds me of a fascinating article I once read about the lost art of diagnosing diseases by smell, and told of a senior doctor in a bygone era advising his students to open all their senses when meeting a patient for the first time.

Apparently some diseases have characteristic smells, but these days medical students are rarely trained to recognize them.

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There is a case of a woman in England that can smell Parkinson [1].

I think that when I read about it was the first time I really understood that smell is a generic sense that can detect certain molecules and that there is much more information encoded in the air around us.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-47627179

Dogs can supposedly tell when humans are sick because of this, even before they know themselves.

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