The use of pine in a healthcare environment

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) ascribed his ability to resurrect the past in his writing to ‘involuntary memory’, whereby, for example, after dipping a piece of madeleine cake into some tea, the ‘shaken partitions in my memory gave way’ under the influence of taste and smell as he recalled Aunt Léonie (Carter, 2000). Aroma, memory, and emotion are intertwined, and readers of a certain age might associate pine with childhood visits to hospitals whose well-ventilated corridors and waiting areas were often disinfected with forest-scented cleaning products that were occasionally swamped with pungent chlorine-tinged antiseptics

Considered the largest genus of conifers, Pinus (Pinaceae) includes more than 100 different species (Dziedziński et al, 2021), and Hickman (2021) explains that the creation of the town of Bournemouth, Dorset, stemmed partly from the apparent health-giving properties of its pine trees. Hickman (2021) further notes that while the Edward VII Sanatorium in Midhurst, Sussex – opened in 1906 – confirmed ‘[t]he choice of pine forests as the ideal and scientifically sanctioned location for sanatoria in Britain …’, the role of pine trees in disinfecting the air later declined, and ‘with the development of successful pharmaceutical and surgical treatments including antibiotics for tuberculosis, the pine forest gradually lost its therapeutic significance’ (Hickman, 2021).