social.noyu.me

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.)

@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.