We haven’t always known what causes diseases, but we’ve always had theories.🦠 Take a journey through science history with Alex Dainis and learn about miasma, the Museum of Science and Dictionary.com #ScienceWordoftheWeek! #WordoftheDay #Vocabulary #Miasma #ScienceHistory | Museum of Science, Boston

The belief that disease resulted from “pestilential air,” known today as the miasma theory, dominated medicine for centuries. This idea originated with ancient Greeks like Hippocrates, who connected health to environmental factors. During the Middle Ages, catastrophic epidemics like the Black Death were often blamed on a “corruption of the air,” which some believed was caused by planetary alignments or earthquakes releasing toxic fumes from the earth. The primary defense was not to fight germs,

For centuries, the miasma theory – the belief that diseases like cholera were caused by foul-smelling air – dominated medicine. This led to public health efforts focused on removing 'bad odors,' often missing the true cause. The work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1870s and 1880s systematically dismantled this idea. Pasteur’s experiments with fermentation and silkworm diseases showed specific microbes caused specific problems. Koch then established definitive proof with his work on anth