“Medicine and perfumery are equal. Both are arts and science.”
Angga
On a can of Axe that started everything, petrichor in a village with no signal, his grandfather’s pipe smoke, and the argument that medicine and perfumery were always the same craft.
Tap the underlined phrases for notes in the margin.
For our twenty-first conversation we sat with Angga Zhan, a general practitioner in Surabaya who describes himself as a man with many big dreams, one of which he has already caught. Becoming a doctor took years, he says, and held a great deal of memory, joy and tears. The fragrance half of him began far earlier and far more humbly, with a can of Axe Chocolate handed to him in elementary school. Medical school introduced the rest: a circle who wore expensive houses, and one bottle of Bleu de Chanel that turned a liking into a study. He now argues, seriously and at length, that his two loves are one discipline.
He did not send a playlist. He sent five separate songs, which is a more particular thing to do. Choose one.
From a can of Axe to Bleu de Chanel
“When I was in elementary school, someone brought and gave me Axe Chocolate,” he says. “Since that day, I was in love with fragrance.” Time flew, as he puts it. By medical school his circle was, in his own affectionate words, literally rich kids, and they walked him through the high-end houses one bottle at a time. Bleu de Chanel EDP was the first that felt like his own, and the point where a pleasant habit became a subject he wanted to understand.
Two disciplines, one craft
Ask him about his relationship with fragrance and he answers as a clinician making a case. For him, medicine and perfumery are equal. Both are arts and science at once, both demand a formula and a feel for it, and both, he points out, were being practised by the same people at the same moment in history.
He is pointing at Ibn Sina, the physician known in Europe as Avicenna, whose Canon of Medicine shaped practice on two continents for centuries. He is also credited with refining steam distillation for essential oils, the technique that made rose oil, and eventually modern perfumery, possible. The same hands, the same century, the same insistence on method. Angga has a point.
Medicine and perfumery are equal. Both are arts and science.
Petrichor, and a village with no signal
The scent that moves him is petrichor, and everything green, wet and mossy around it. It returns him to his internship, and to the week he spent posted at a small community health centre in a village held inside a forest. No signal. No engine noise. Just the work in front of him, and the smell of rain arriving on leaves.
It is a doctor’s memory as much as a scent memory: the first stretch of a career where nothing was theoretical any more, and where the nearest distraction was a long way off.
Field note · Green, wet, mossyRain on leaves, and no engine anywhere.
Spices, tobacco, and his grandfather
Spices and tobacco do something else entirely. They call him back to his late grandfather in Yogyakarta, and to the advice the old man gave him more than once, in the tone of a thing that must not be forgotten. One day, when you are successful, never leave your Sholat, and always remember where you came from.
It is the sort of instruction that survives the person who gave it, and it arrives now through pipe smoke and clove, without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
When you are successful, never leave your prayer. And always remember where you came from.
Yogyakarta · Spices and tobaccoThe advice that outlived the man who gave it.
What he wears, and when
His wardrobe is not a ranking, it is a schedule. He wears one set for the working day, another for Friday prayer, and another for the hours that belong to nobody but him. Below is the whole rotation, sorted the way he actually reaches for it.
For the working day, and the ordinary hours in it.
- iHoM Haute Sartorial Noblesse
- iiSovereign Sang Vivant
- iiiNishane Wulong Cha X
For Friday prayer, when the week gathers itself.
- iHoM Haute The Grand Traverse
- iiRococo Jazz Fragonard
For the hours that belong to nobody but him.
- iWhen Heaven Forgot Me
- iiMiles Dewey Davis
- iiiAtaraksia Oedud Roro Mendut
A day, in three small doses
A cup of coffee with music in his ears, which is what actually opens his eyes. A workout, to keep body and soul in working order. Then a spray of something he loves and a series playing while he falls asleep. Three doses, morning, middle and night, and none of them complicated.
Good taste, and one belief
Good taste, he says, is born from knowing yourself first: your own character, your own preference, before anyone else’s list. The rest comes from exposure, from having been around enough good work to recognise it on sight. Taste is not inherited and it is not bought. It is what is left after you have paid attention for long enough.
And the belief he would defend is the one he applies at work every day, to patients and to everyone else.
Stay down to earth, with empathy. It is the key to being a good person, and a good doctor.
Outro · The collection, and the companyArts and science, kept on one shelf.
“For me, medicine and perfumery are equal. Arts and science, both of them, to make someone feel better day by day.”