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god save me, i'm going to become a miasma truther. here is a guy writing in 1765 about it:
By miasma is meant extremely subtle bodies that are believed to be the propagators of contagious diseases; people rather naturally thought that these small pieces of prodigiously attenuated material escaped from bodies infected by the disease and communicated it to non-infected people, penetrating their bodies after being spread through the air or more directly, passing immediately from the affected bodies to the non-infected; it is only by their effects that we have been able suspect their existence; a single man infected by the plague spread this disastrous illness through many countries.
(https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.369?view=text;rgn=main)
nothing said here is incompatible with the germ theory of disease! the belief is that the air, and perhaps other things, could be contaminated by tiny particles that spread disease, which is… correct!
now, obviously they never were able to identify what these particles were, where they came from, or how they worked, given the technological limitations of the time prevented their detection. consequently, there are a lot of ideas associated with miasmas that were wrong. but the core idea was absolutely right. pre-industrial humanity was far smarter than we give it credit for.
(btw i encourage reading the rest of the part i quoted, it's quite interesting.)
(the context is someone was making fun of the mediæval belief that the plague was spread by “bad air”, because of course yersinia pestis is actually spread by rats. well, did you know that it could also be airborne? the mediæval europeans were right!!)
@hikari I wonder how much this prejudice has contributed to twentieth and twenty-first century belief that many diseases (including the recent big one) aren’t airborne, just droplet-borne, despite early twentieth century findings about aerosolisation, droplet size, etc.
@hikari Interesting, I was wondering where that word came from. In Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, the German version translates gloom to miasma.
@hikari The important lesson for me from things like this has always been not that the ancients were smart, but that I have the capacity to be just as stupid as they were, I just have the benefit of access to information.
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@beeoproblem@mastodon.gamedev.place
@hikari yeah, miasma isn't wrong per se but it is incomplete and didn't quite get the mechanism right Ancient people were ignorant, not stupid.
Miasma gets the general concept of toxic molds, toxic gas, rotten stuff generally carrying disease etc but misses infectious, insect borne and waterborne disease.
Not a terrible hypothesis all told. Certainly good enough to avoid a lot of problems even if it didn't address everything