Sumner's "On testing the sense of smell" revisited

The routine test of olfaction need not lead to an ambiguous outcome, a rather widely held notion. A multiple-choice test of odor identification that avoided the difficulty of retrieving odor names yielded excellent resolution among the categories normosmic, hyposmic, and anosmic. The outcome agreed almost perfectly with a more complicated test of threshold and offered much encouragement for the use of odor identification in rapid screening of olfaction.