Wake Up and Smell the Ammonia

Anders handed me a deteriorating plastic bag with a glass jar nestled inside. I could feel a faint slime on the outside of the bag that, combined with my tired fingers from a prior workout, made it difficult to release the knotted handles. This was an inauspicious sign for two reasons; not only was I already fatigued and perhaps not ready to lift heavy weights again, but the residue on my fingers suggested that the smelling salts inside were eating away at the plastic. What then would this substance to do to my nose? My lungs? My brain?Inside the glass jar was a plastic pharmacy bottle of smelling salts, rather like a Russian nesting doll full of stimulants. The ominous effect of this arrangement was enhanced by the fact that the outer jar had clearly been requisitioned from Anders's kitchen at some point, in an attempt to contain the creeping scent of ammonia. Any trace of the jam or pesto it previously contained had been obliterated by a smell akin to a long-neglected urinal.“These have been in there a while. You should have smelled them when I first got them. They'd take your head off,” he said.I wonder where he kept it. Surely not in the house? Like the bag, the jar was sweating, and even through multiple layers of glass and plastic the scent irritated my eyes and nostrils.“Don't sniff the bottle until you're ready to squat your final weight. It only lasts a few seconds,” he explained. “Sniff and lift.”He and I both knew that with or without the smelling salts, there would be nothing impressive about the weights I moved that night, at least not by his standards. I made a self-disparaging remark about this, but he was quick to remind me: “No, no, no! You're a good lifter . . . for a normal bloke.” Anders, a mohawked powerlifter with legs the size of my torso and Norse tattoos covering much of his visible skin, is not a normal bloke—he could overhead press a weight that I struggled to squat. There was a cocky machismo about his comment that made me feel at home. Like the reek of stale piss emanating from the nearby jar of smelling salts, it reminded me of the football clubs I had been part of since childhood.There were other smells too: the inimitable rubbery odor of the gym flooring, my own drying sweat, and the more pleasing scents of baked dough and spices wafting in from the Ukrainian restaurant across the road. The scents of vulcanized rubber, sweat, and ammonia have combined innumerable times in the history of modern physical culture, but the notes of pierogis and cabbage melded with my memories of this cafe opening just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and signaled the distinct temporality of my 2025 experiment with smelling salts. As historians are so often called to do, I was reminded that my instrument of interpretation, my nose in this case, is rooted firmly in the present and cannot hope to fully recapture the past, even via scents that have long continuances.After several warm-up sets, I settled on 100 kg as my final weight—up, down, and then gingerly back up again. Not a bad lift for me. The next step was to lift the same weight after inhaling the salts, under the assumption being that sniffing the piquant ammonia gas would energize me into superhuman strength. Earlier in the year I watched as an entire team of National Rugby League (the elite men's rugby league competition in Australia) players passed around a brown bottle of smelling salts in the changing room, with each man sniffing the contents and recoiling wide-eyed before charging onto the field.1 That team went on to lose the game, but there is clearly a current perception among many contact- and power-sport athletes that inhaling the acrid fumes provides a performance boost of some kind.The smelling salts renaissance may be linked to their recent endorsement by sports-adjacent-macho-influencers like podcaster Joe Rogan, which lends the substance a certain aura of snake-oiliness. While there is an air of pseudoscience around smelling salts, there is a legitimate physiological pathway that explains their perceived efficacy. The active compound in smelling salts is ammonium carbonate (NH4)2CO3, which produces ammonia gas (NH3) when exposed to oxygen. This gas irritates the mucosal lining of the airways, particularly the nose, triggering a respiratory response that attempts to rid the airways of the offending substance.2 This sudden increase in respiration enables more oxygen to reach the brain, which may produce a transient state of heightened alertness. Although there is no reliable scientific evidence that smelling salts increase muscle recruitment or any other physiological mechanisms that are traditionally associated with strength and power output, there is significant anecdotal evidence that the increased respiration triggered by the ammonia gas can rouse an unconscious patient or produce a temporary sense of focus.3Regardless of my skepticism, I grasped the container, looked into the crystalline substance within it, and inhaled deeply. My head snapped back as the fumes pushed their way past my sinuses and seemingly into the center of my skull. “Fuck!” I yelped into the empty gym. I felt like my brain had been power washed and I moved quickly to shoulder the bar, which lifted away from the hooks willingly. My squat felt clean and easy and, although I hesitate to claim that I felt stronger, I was more focused. There was only the task at hand; no noises, no thoughts, just a knowledge that the weight had to go down and then back up again. I re-racked and enjoyed a firm slap on the shoulder from Anders, accompanied by a taciturn nod.Reveling in a sense of manly euphoria, I was later brought short by memories of reading Dickens or Austen, where swooning ladies were revived by an amphora of smelling salts wafted delicately under their noses. Think of Pride and Prejudice and the insensible Mrs. Bennet's constant calls for smelling salts upon the receipt of bad news. How did the inhalation of ammonium carbonate transform from a performance of feminine delicacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the pungent expression of athletic masculinity in which I partook?Odor is neither masculine nor feminine until it is assigned as such, and at some point in the past two hundred years the gendered notions associated with smelling salts shifted from being ardently feminine to reactively masculine. As sensory historian Willian Tullett argues, “Smell is deeply cultural, and both historical and contemporary responses to odours have always been informed by perceptual lenses that have been specific to a period, place, or community.”4In the partial history of smelling salts that follows, I argue that it was sport that catalyzed this shift in the gendered implications of inhaling ammonia salts.Early references to smelling salts, also known as Hammoniacus Sal or Sal Ammoniac and usually made from burned or crushed animal feces, feathers, horns and hooves, stretch back to classical-era Egypt and early Imperial Rome.5 Chaucer's alchemist also makes a passing reference to “sal amonyak” in The Canterbury Tales, suggesting that English readers in the Middle Ages were familiar enough with the substance to understand its usage without further explanation. These are traces only, and smelling salts began to appear more fully in the literature of the Georgian and Victorian eras, particularly in Britain and its colonies.According to literary scholar Rebekah King, “From the eighteenth century onwards, smelling salts acted a central role in the performance of female delicacy.”6 At this point, their earlier use as a restorative medicine became folded into performances of aristocratic femininity. The perceived desirability of female weakness led to wealthy women swooning or fainting when confronted with indecency, shock, rejection.7 As has been argued by scholars of late modernity, swooning was often a social affectation rather than an actual physiological phenomenon, and smelling salts played an important part in the act.8 By carrying smelling salts as part of their daily accoutrements, women in the Georgian and Victorian elite conspicuously displayed their fragility and desirability, and the corollary of this was to establish smelling salts as decidedly unmasculine. As King explains, “When translated into male hands, smelling salts immediately rendered their owner effeminate.”9Referred to also as “hartshorn,” “spirit of hartshorn,” “aquila coelestis,” “sal volatile,” or “eau de luce,” these compositions varied with the addition of different perfumes, such as lavender or balsam, but retained the active compound of ammonium carbonate. By searching for these terms in twenty-four Australian sporting newspapers within the Australian National Library's digital archive Trove, I aimed to chart the historical journey of smelling salts from the effete world of Georgian manor houses to gym floors and football locker rooms. These periodicals were written by men, for men, and the perspectives of women are missing. Where women are discussed in these publications, it was generally in short stories and society anecdotes. These newspapers were precursors to modern men's magazines such as Sports Illustrated and often contained social news and gossip, not just sports reports. This bricolage of sensory excerpts is therefore a selective but nonetheless revealing depiction of the ways that smelling salts were used by the Australian sporting press to reinforce binary notions of gender.Evidence from Australian sporting newspapers reflects the feminine associations of smelling salts during the mid-nineteenth century. Bell's Life and Sporting Reviewer in 1851 told of a tradesman courting a “fine woman” at a masquerade ball, only to have her faint in his arms.10 The lady could not be revived by “salts, or vinegar, or hartshorn,” but awakened quickly when a passerby blew pipe smoke into her face. In the process, her mask fell and revealed “a pair of big whiskers and large moustache—the charmer was a man.”11 The implication was that smelling salts were effective only for women, but a man could be revived by the rugged scent of tobacco. Alcohol too was seen as a more suitable resurrection agent for men. The Sydney Sportsman in 1901 tells of a woman instructing her husband as to the sorting of their laundry: “Look in the hip pocket . . . if it's smelling salts they're mine; if it's brandy they're yours.”12Granularity was added to these descriptions when Australian sports journalists wrote about the fashionableness of smelling salts. A young man describing his ideal future wife to Bell's Life in 1853 hoped that she would need “no smelling salts or sal volatile” because he assumed she could be revived just as quickly by the shock of noticing a stain on her dress or a tussled hairdo.13 Melbourne's Sportsman wryly praised the new ladies dressing rooms at Flemington race course in 1883, which provided “hairpins, reels of silk, violet powder, smelling salts, and various other accessories of the female get up.”14 The Sydney Sportsman in 1901 listed smelling salts among the essential items of a lady's chatelaine, alongside a “miniature mirror . . . their dainty purse . . . and a pocket spittoon.”15 In the mid- to late nineteenth century, smelling salts were described by the Australian sporting press as a fashion item, tantamount to women's fragility and narcissism and therefore outside the supposedly rational realm of post-enlightenment masculinity.It is intriguing therefore to witness this emblem of feminine delicacy become part of a self-consciously masculine and rational endeavor: the emergence of sport science at the turn of the twentieth century. The beginnings of this transition can be detected in the final years of the nineteenth century. Sportsman in 1890 described Footscray, a famed Australian rules football team, using “smelling salts to such purpose during the interval” as to greatly improve its performance thereafter. The same publication in 1902 also recommended mixing hartshorn with laudanum, alcohol, iodine, and various other ingredients to make an ointment “for strengthening and hardening the bones” of athletes.16 A 1903 instructional manual for “Handling Pugilists” in the Referee lists “smelling salts, oxygen, electric fans, or attending physicians” as innovations in the science of boxing.17 By l925, according to the Sporting Globe, smelling salts and a “mouthful of champagne” were seen as an essential stimulant that boxing cornermen must keep on hand.18 Smelling salts were also described being used by a medico in 1922 alongside “violet ray treatment to the back of the nut” to bring a footballer back to his senses during a rugby game.19 Unlike smelling salts, violet ray electrodes and champagne bubbles remained in the experimental era of sports medicine in the British world.20There is, of course, no suggestion in these articles that the acceptance of smelling salts into the realm manly sports might jar with prior depictions of the substance as an emblem of feminine irrationality and weakness. The journalists’ literary workaround for this contradiction was to employ markedly different language when describing the effect of smelling salts on male athletes as compared with women. For example, in 1919, a domestic scene from a short story printed in Sport depicted a woman who “wished to have a quiet day on the sofa with a book and a bottle of smelling salts,” suggesting the salts had a calming effect.21 By contrast, in 1923, the Referee relayed an anecdote from boxer Jack Dempsey whose whiff of smelling salts “nearly lifted me out of my chair.”22 The Sydney Sportsman in 1924 noted a boxer who “had his head unroofed by high power smelling salts, and again pushed out to meet his fate” and in 1925 praised “smelling salts, calculated strong enough to lift the roof off a pawnbroker's safe” for staving off the defeat of a young fighter.23By this point, smelling salts had become inextricable from the “smell and noise” that historian John Maynard says characterized Australian boxing gyms.24 Australian sport journalists believed at the time (and continue to believe) that the antipodean way of practicing sport was uniquely rugged, and some employed olfactory cues to reinforce this impression. For example, Sport ungraciously described the “swagger and swank” of a Los Angeles boxing gym in 1926, noting that only the “reek of smelling salts and the occasional fragrance of wintergreen” made it recognizable with the more manly setting of Australian pugilism.25 By the late 1920s, the masculinization of smelling salts was almost total, prompted by its adoption by early sports scientists and aided by the linguistic gymnastics of journalists who reversed the gendered intonations of the language they used to describe its use and effects. The calming restorative once mocked by sports journalists as a fashionable women's trinket had become an explosive stimulant that could rouse a tiring athlete to victory or enable a brain-damaged boxer to heroically fight on.This shift was partly due to changing gender norms during the post-Edwardian period in Britain and its Commonwealth. In simple terms, Australia's reliance on women's labor during the First World War began to dispel myths around female fragility and, as attested by the Australian Women's Mirror in 1925, it was “no longer fashionable for the lovely lady to faint, nor is it necessary to have an attack of the vapours at least once a week to be considered genteel.”26 Fainting, swooning, and smelling salts were no longer needed to signify upper-class femininity, and their adoption by working-class men in sports such as boxing and football solidified their transition into the masculine realm. It is also likely that incipient concerns about brain trauma in boxing prompted trainers and fighters to explore potential remedies for concussions.27 This, combined with an Edwardian shift toward the rationalization and civilization of boxing, prompted pugilists to reduce the apparent brutality of the sport.28 Smelling salts, with their ability to seemingly raise a boxer from the dead, served that purpose.Perhaps the most pungent example of the gendered transformation of smelling salts was the coverage of a minor scandal in Australian women's cycling. In May 1940, a team of Victorian women competing in the Australian cycling championships were accused of doping because they had sniffed salts before a race.29 The true nature of their transgression was not that they had breached the rules of competition. Smelling salts were an acceptable and harmless aid for male athletes, including cyclists, as evidenced in 1931 when the Referee suggested that “a male rider who wasn't feeling quite up to the mark before a race would be benefited by a little sal volatile.”30 Rather, by using smelling salts to enhance their performance, these sportswomen had used the substance in a masculine way and in doing so had tarnished “the good name of their Association.”31 Where once these women might have been praised for sniffing the salts to enhance their feminine appeal, by the 1940s their use of the substance was evidence of their attempt to infiltrate the masculine practice of competitive sport.It is not clear from the extant sources whether changing post-Edwardian gender norms enabled smelling salts to be into manly like boxing and or if their use in sport a of gender As is almost always the with historical it is likely that both What is is that particularly boxing, played an important role in the of smelling salts, the way for inhaling ammonia gas to become a of historian Tullett to as as in In this partial the most significant is that the to the of smell in this case, are to constant