The pomander — a perforated case containing aromatic spices or herbs, carried or hung to ward off infection and mask unpleasant smells — appears in medieval and early modern poetry as both practical object and symbol of the body's vulnerability; Shakespeare's contemporaries carried pomanders against plague, and a poem set in Elizabethan or Jacobean London might describe the pomander as "the street's only defence — the sweet spices of cloves and nutmeg held against the nose while the city went about its mortal business"; The pomander's spherical shape — often of silver or gold — and its perforated surface give it a visual ambiguity: an object that breathes, that perfumes without touching; In a poem about a great household's armoury against illness, the pomander hangs from a girdle alongside the prayer book and the purse: three things against three kinds of danger; Herrick's poems, attentive to sweet smells and sensuous surfaces, might naturally include a pomander: "she wore it at her belt, the spices breathing through the silver as she walked"; A poem about early modern medicine's reliance on smell theory — the miasma doctrine — might use the pomander as its central irony: the beautiful instrument of an understanding that was perfectly wrong.