Section 41. (d) The Sense of Taste.
The sense of taste is rarely of legal importance, but when it does
come into importance it is regularly very significant because it
involves, in the main, problems of poisoning. The explanation of
such cases is rarely easy and certain—first of all, because we can
not, without difficulty, get into a position of testing the delicacy
and acuteness of any individual sense of taste, where such testing
is quite simple with regard to seeing and hearing. At the same time,
it is necessary when tests are made, to depend upon general, and
rarely constant impressions, since very few people mean the same
thing by, stinging, prickly, metallic, and burning tastes, even though
the ordinary terms sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, may be accepted
as approximately constant. The least that can be done when a
taste is defined as good, bad, excellent, or disgusting, is to test it
in every possible direction with regard to the age, habits, health,
and intelligence of the taster, for all of these exercise great influence
on his values. Similarly necessary are valuations like flat, sweetish,
contractile, limey, pappy, sandy, which are all dictated by almost
momentary variations in well-being.
But if any denotation is to be depended upon, and in the end
some one has to be, it is necessary to determine whether the perception
has been made with the end or the root of the
tongue.[1]
Longet, following the experiments of certain others, has brought
together definite results in the following table:
In such cases too, particularly as diseased conditions and personal
idiosyncrasies exercise considerable influences, it will be important
to call in the physician. Dehn is led by his experiments to the
conclusion that woman's sense of taste is finer than man's, and
again that that of the educated man finer than that of the uneducated.
In women education makes no difference in this regard.
[[ id="n41.1"]]
A. Strindberg. Zur Physiologie des Geschmacks. wiener Rundschau, 1900.
p. 338 ff.
