Before decending into the lower divisions of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil’s “descent will have to be delayed, so that [their] sense can become a little accustomed to the evil smell; and then [they] can disregard it” (Inferno XI: x-xii). This passage indicates two medieval concepts, the concept of Hell as an assult of the human senses and the concept of smell idiosyncratic  of contagion. The imagery through out Inferno up until this point has emphasized the exess of the senses being overstymulated by foulness, from deafening noise, hidious oders, to scenes of unspeakable violence to the human physicality. This is the notion that Hell is a display of corporial punishment on the soul for its sins when it once had a true physical form in life. The sense of smell in particular in Hell takes on a whole new layer beyond the notion of over stymulation. Smell in the Middle Ages was considered one of the main ways in which contagion is spread, which is why in the years of the plague the infamous image of plague doctor mask was prominant, because it was believed that smells took longer to travel in these masks and in the beak of the mask there would be sweet smelling herbs to block the foul smell of contagion. When looking at this opening passage in the Inferno (ad just Inferno as a whole) the sense of smell is brought to the center of the delay that Dante and Virgil must edure before their decent. This is because they do not want to be assulted and consequently corrupted by the contagion of evil. Evil, in the Middle Ages, was treated like a disease, which is why evil or unsavory people are usually portrayed as having a form of contagious  illness like leprasy or pox and in Dante’s Comedy this notion of evil as contagion, as displayed in this passage in Canto XI, is salient.