Monday, 26 September 2011
Bad air and miasma
Malaria gets its name from the Italian mala aria (bad air), and was originally
associated with the swamps and marshlands of Rome. The word was first recorded
in English in 1740, when Horace Walpole wrote: “A horrid thing called the mal'aria, that comes to Rome every summer and
kills one”. So ubiquitous was the disease that it acquired a specific name
– Roman Fever, where its virulence may have contributed to the fall of the
Roman Empire.
The British were horribly afflicted with both
malaria and yellow fever, both prevalent in the tropical and sub-tropical
climates of their imperial conquests. Western medical science had not yet differentiated
these tropical maladies and concluded that they were transmitted by miasmas - a noxious form of “bad air” that was blamed for
many unexplained conditions (for example London’s nineteenth century cholera
epidemics).
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