WEBVTT - Miasma Theory and the Evil Air 0:00:03.000 --> 0:00:05.840 Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff 0:00:05.880 --> 0:00:14.319 Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:17.160 your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. 0:00:17.160 --> 0:00:20.159 And today we're going to be exploring a topic in 0:00:20.200 --> 0:00:24.639 the history of epidemiology and medicine and uh and a 0:00:24.680 --> 0:00:29.280 precursor to modern germ theory. Yes, we're talking about me 0:00:29.440 --> 0:00:32.440 asthma theory, which this is. This is something that has 0:00:32.560 --> 0:00:35.600 has long fascinated me just as a if nothing else, 0:00:35.640 --> 0:00:39.159 just as an idea that I'm just struck by this 0:00:39.440 --> 0:00:43.159 vision of bad air rising up out of some Gothic 0:00:43.240 --> 0:00:47.840 cemetery and uh, and in fearful humans running for their 0:00:47.920 --> 0:00:51.640 lives to avoid that air touching them and turning them 0:00:51.640 --> 0:00:54.360 into Google's or something. You know. Yeah, So, if you're 0:00:54.400 --> 0:00:58.200 not familiar with this, uh, this long running hypothesis in 0:00:58.320 --> 0:01:00.760 human history, I think we should set the scene for 0:01:00.920 --> 0:01:03.400 you at the time of the Black Death in Europe. 0:01:03.880 --> 0:01:07.080 All right, let's go there, Okay, bring bring them out. 0:01:07.160 --> 0:01:10.800 So in the late thirteen forties, the first outbreak of 0:01:10.840 --> 0:01:13.360 the Black Death fell on Europe, and it was I 0:01:13.400 --> 0:01:15.880 think we can say, without a doubt the greatest human 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:19.040 disaster that had ever come to the continent, right. Uh. 0:01:19.080 --> 0:01:22.360 Somewhere between a third and two thirds of the entire 0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:28.040 population died. Communities and entire towns were depopulated. People didn't 0:01:28.080 --> 0:01:30.319 know what to do with all of the dead and 0:01:30.440 --> 0:01:33.520 dying people around them, And perhaps the worst part was 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:37.120 nobody knew what caused it. Now, when we have a 0:01:37.360 --> 0:01:40.240 you know, a pandemic, at least we can we feel 0:01:40.319 --> 0:01:43.720 like we have some sense of control, you know, I mean, 0:01:43.959 --> 0:01:47.640 just many people can still die from pandemics, but you 0:01:47.680 --> 0:01:51.640 can understand, Okay, there there is an organism causing this disease. 0:01:51.800 --> 0:01:54.920 Maybe medical science can do something about it. We're working 0:01:54.920 --> 0:01:57.080 on the problem. But at the time, you just you 0:01:57.120 --> 0:02:00.920 had a limited understanding of how us a disease work, 0:02:01.200 --> 0:02:04.280 and beyond that you would have to term to supernatural 0:02:04.280 --> 0:02:08.520 explanations or perhaps the appearance of of knotted rats in 0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:11.560 the ruins of the house, that sort of thing. Yeah, 0:02:11.919 --> 0:02:14.600 you know, Actually, what might be worse than people not 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:18.120 knowing what caused the plague was that many people thought 0:02:18.200 --> 0:02:20.480 they knew, and almost all of them were wrong. A 0:02:20.560 --> 0:02:23.320 little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right, Yeah, So, as 0:02:23.360 --> 0:02:26.200 you might expect, some people simply chalk the disease up 0:02:26.440 --> 0:02:30.200 to magical punishments sent by God. So in thirteen forty nine, 0:02:30.560 --> 0:02:33.919 Archbishop Zusch of York wrote an open letter to his 0:02:34.080 --> 0:02:37.400 diocese that read as follows quote, there can be no 0:02:37.480 --> 0:02:40.480 one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge, 0:02:40.760 --> 0:02:45.040 how great mortality, pestilence, and infection of the air are 0:02:45.080 --> 0:02:48.880 now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England. 0:02:49.160 --> 0:02:51.880 And this is surely caused by the sins of men who, 0:02:52.000 --> 0:02:55.480 while enjoying good times, forget that such things are the 0:02:55.520 --> 0:02:58.160 gifts of the most high giver. Now, one could be 0:02:58.200 --> 0:03:00.960 optimistic and say, well, we don't think that anymore, but 0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:07.440 I still see frequent eclips from television shows of of 0:03:07.440 --> 0:03:12.639 of individuals speaking to their congregation, for instance, and saying, oh, well, 0:03:12.680 --> 0:03:16.160 clearly this is because of our sin, either this disease 0:03:16.200 --> 0:03:19.639 outbreak or this natural disaster. Clearly this is the reason 0:03:19.680 --> 0:03:22.800 that we are suffering. But that's kind of a side tension. Now. 0:03:22.880 --> 0:03:25.760 I think you're going to have two persistent facts throughout 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:28.440 history and continuing into the future. One is the fact 0:03:28.520 --> 0:03:32.160 that you know, great calamities befall humankind, and the other 0:03:32.280 --> 0:03:34.960 is the fact that people are always doing something that 0:03:35.000 --> 0:03:38.440 other people don't like, and so anytime people can connect 0:03:38.480 --> 0:03:41.640 the two, they're gonna try, right. And then also this 0:03:41.640 --> 0:03:47.360 this comment, this this confusion of teleological explanations and causitive explanations, right, 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:53.000 trying to explain why this happened, why this, uh, this, 0:03:53.000 --> 0:03:56.880 this calamity occurred based on a cause and effect scenario, 0:03:57.200 --> 0:04:00.600 and then also trying to work it into your worldview 0:04:00.600 --> 0:04:04.960 in which there is some sort of divine infrastructure in place. Yeah. 0:04:05.000 --> 0:04:07.200 But then, of course, even at the time you had 0:04:07.240 --> 0:04:09.800 some people who tried to come in with their idea 0:04:09.880 --> 0:04:12.080 of a scientific explanation. They wanted to get to the 0:04:12.160 --> 0:04:16.040 root cause, right. So in thirteen forty eight, King Philip 0:04:16.080 --> 0:04:18.599 the sixth of France wanted to get to the bottom 0:04:18.600 --> 0:04:21.760 of what was causing the terrible disaster. So he gathered 0:04:21.839 --> 0:04:25.080 the most learned scholars of the medical faculty of the 0:04:25.160 --> 0:04:29.040 University of Paris, and he charged them with explaining the 0:04:29.040 --> 0:04:31.960 origins of the great death and coming up with solutions 0:04:32.000 --> 0:04:34.799 to fight it. They came back to him with an answer. 0:04:35.360 --> 0:04:40.400 On March twenty five, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, 0:04:40.760 --> 0:04:46.480 something crucial and devastating had happened Mars Jupiter and Saturn 0:04:46.600 --> 0:04:51.200 all lined up in conjunction within the House of Aquarius, 0:04:51.240 --> 0:04:54.680 and this event heralded exactly what France was undergoing at 0:04:54.680 --> 0:04:57.960 the time, because the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was 0:04:58.040 --> 0:05:01.240 known to cause death and calamity. The conjunction of Jupiter 0:05:01.320 --> 0:05:05.200 and Mars was known to bring a pestilence on the wind, 0:05:05.480 --> 0:05:08.839 and here you were getting both conjunctions at the same time. 0:05:09.360 --> 0:05:12.640 In the words of the historian Old Age Jurgen Benedicto 0:05:12.720 --> 0:05:15.839 in his book The Black Death thirteen to thirteen fifty 0:05:15.880 --> 0:05:20.720 three quote. In this astrological theory of epidemiology, Jupiter was 0:05:20.760 --> 0:05:24.520 assumed to be warm and humid and to draw malignant 0:05:24.640 --> 0:05:28.560 vapors both from the ground and from water, while Mars 0:05:28.680 --> 0:05:31.480 was assumed to be hot and dry and therefore had 0:05:31.520 --> 0:05:36.120 the capacity to kindle such malignant vapors into infective fire. 0:05:37.000 --> 0:05:40.480 So they're postulating a cause and effect. The planets lined up, 0:05:41.080 --> 0:05:44.279 and that did something to the Earth that caused these 0:05:44.279 --> 0:05:48.440 infective vapors to appear, and this was what was causing 0:05:48.440 --> 0:05:54.280 the plague. Uh so so so basically situations were astrologically 0:05:54.480 --> 0:05:58.600 just right to draw some sort of disease causing vapor 0:05:59.120 --> 0:06:01.480 out of the bowels the Earth. Right, So notice how 0:06:01.560 --> 0:06:03.479 under this theory there's really not much you can do 0:06:03.560 --> 0:06:05.800 to stop the spread of the disease. Yeah, you can't 0:06:05.880 --> 0:06:10.440 change the the movement of the spheres. That can't eradicate 0:06:10.520 --> 0:06:13.120 the sickness living in the earth. You just left to 0:06:13.120 --> 0:06:15.880 suffer whatever occurs. Yeah, this is even worse than like 0:06:15.920 --> 0:06:18.799 the theological judgment, right, because at least in that case 0:06:18.839 --> 0:06:21.240 you'd think, well, maybe we can pray and petition God 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:23.600 to not do this to us anymore. Right, you can 0:06:23.640 --> 0:06:27.680 appeal to God, you can't appeal to the clockwork movements 0:06:27.760 --> 0:06:29.719 of the of the solar system. Right. It is a 0:06:29.920 --> 0:06:35.800 is a pitiless astrological verdict. But but also despite being 0:06:35.880 --> 0:06:39.400 a death by pure active fate, Benedictive notes that since 0:06:39.480 --> 0:06:42.600 this theory entailed the more proximate cause of the disease 0:06:42.640 --> 0:06:45.680 to be something more in the form of malignant vapors 0:06:45.760 --> 0:06:49.320 rather than just straight up curse from God, some thought 0:06:49.360 --> 0:06:52.360 that they could help avoid the disease by avoiding those 0:06:52.400 --> 0:06:55.760 malignant vapors. So, like the planets cause the Earth to 0:06:55.960 --> 0:06:59.480 release malignant vapors, or release malignant vapors on the Earth, 0:06:59.480 --> 0:07:02.040 So if you can just avoid breathing this stuff in 0:07:02.160 --> 0:07:05.599 or being exposed to it, then you can avoid the plague. 0:07:06.160 --> 0:07:09.240 So just don't go to places where they're bad smells, 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:12.760 and therefore you might avoid the particular bad smells that 0:07:12.800 --> 0:07:16.320 cause disease. Yes, and so this was a thing that 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:21.080 you see throughout history, the linking of disease with foul 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:26.080 smelling objects and things like filth and rotting organic matter, 0:07:26.760 --> 0:07:30.120 which in itself, this kind of avoidance behavior may have 0:07:30.240 --> 0:07:33.760 sometimes helped people avoid infection, though not necessarily for the 0:07:33.800 --> 0:07:37.280 reasons they believed. Now, of course, we know today that 0:07:37.320 --> 0:07:41.080 the Black Death was caused by infectious disease caused by germs. 0:07:41.160 --> 0:07:44.320 In fact, there is actually still an interesting debate. Almost 0:07:44.320 --> 0:07:46.520 all scientists, I think, agree that the Black Death was 0:07:46.560 --> 0:07:50.560 caused by bubonic plague or your Cinea pestis, but there 0:07:50.560 --> 0:07:53.320 have been some rival hypotheses in the past few decades 0:07:53.320 --> 0:07:55.240 that it was something else, like maybe some kind of 0:07:55.320 --> 0:07:58.680 viral hemorrhagic fever. Uh, and that topic might be worth 0:07:58.720 --> 0:08:00.960 a look on its own for a different episodes. And yeah, 0:08:01.040 --> 0:08:05.240 well there's always room to discuss more death. But the 0:08:05.280 --> 0:08:08.480 confusion over the cause of the outbreak contu it really 0:08:08.840 --> 0:08:11.360 it caused this sense of horror and despair, and many 0:08:11.400 --> 0:08:14.679 writers of the time, like Petrarch has all this great 0:08:14.720 --> 0:08:17.960 plague poetry is just about like, oh, how much worse 0:08:18.000 --> 0:08:20.640 can things get? Is just going on and on lamenting. 0:08:20.960 --> 0:08:23.360 I don't know why I sound like that, Like I'm 0:08:23.800 --> 0:08:26.160 like calling him out for lamenting the plague. I mean 0:08:26.160 --> 0:08:29.720 the plague was really awful. Uh, there there was sometimes 0:08:29.760 --> 0:08:33.320 there were more bodies than anybody could figure out where 0:08:33.320 --> 0:08:35.360 to put them, and so like to bring out your 0:08:35.400 --> 0:08:40.680 dead scenario is literally mirroring things that happened in the past. 0:08:41.320 --> 0:08:43.560 But I want to take you to another setting during 0:08:43.640 --> 0:08:47.520 the Black Death of the forties, that of Catholic Pope 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:50.440 Clement the Six, who was living in Avignon at the time. 0:08:50.640 --> 0:08:52.360 Now you might wonder, wait a minute, why is the 0:08:52.360 --> 0:08:55.280 Pope living in Avignon. Shouldn't he be, you know, at 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:58.880 the Vatican. Shouldn't be at Rome For some complicated political 0:08:58.960 --> 0:09:01.719 reasons having to do with the French monarchy. There were 0:09:01.720 --> 0:09:04.320 several popes in the fourteenth century who lived in Avignon, 0:09:05.240 --> 0:09:07.960 and so he so Pope Clement the Six was pope 0:09:08.000 --> 0:09:11.160 from thirteen forty two until his death in thirteen fifty two, 0:09:11.240 --> 0:09:13.920 which means he was pope when the first large outbreak 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:16.720 of black death hit hit Europe in thirteen forty eight, 0:09:16.960 --> 0:09:19.640 and he was notable for granting remission of sins to 0:09:19.720 --> 0:09:22.960 those who died of the plague. But he himself survived 0:09:22.960 --> 0:09:27.520 the plague. So what did he do? Well? Clement consulted 0:09:27.559 --> 0:09:31.160 his surgeons and he wanted to know what's what's what's 0:09:31.200 --> 0:09:34.560 the plan? Okay, give me a strategy. And because many 0:09:34.640 --> 0:09:38.400 experts believed the bad air was to blame, they recommended, 0:09:38.640 --> 0:09:41.440 for example, fleeing to the mountains or somewhere else with 0:09:41.559 --> 0:09:44.360 pure air. But if you're pope, you can't just run 0:09:44.400 --> 0:09:46.800 off in the wilderness, can you. So instead, on the 0:09:46.840 --> 0:09:51.040 advice of his surgeons, Clement barricaded himself inside his palace 0:09:51.080 --> 0:09:56.520 in Avignon and sat surrounded by torches and fires, constantly 0:09:56.559 --> 0:09:59.960 burning fires under the belief that fire would somehow clear 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:03.640 en or purify the air. It would get these bad 0:10:03.760 --> 0:10:06.640 vapors out of it. And whether or not the method 0:10:06.679 --> 0:10:09.520 had anything to do with it, Clement survived the plague. Huh. 0:10:10.040 --> 0:10:12.280 And it's kind of ironic to given that the first 0:10:13.360 --> 0:10:15.800 bit of advice go into the middle of nowhere. It's 0:10:15.880 --> 0:10:19.880 probably pretty good advice as well, assuming that this was 0:10:19.880 --> 0:10:22.400 was definitely a case of ubonic plague, that it was 0:10:22.440 --> 0:10:27.760 the fleas on rats that are living in a cramped 0:10:27.840 --> 0:10:30.960 urban environment. Yeah, it would make sense to become a 0:10:31.040 --> 0:10:33.760 hermit pope in the woods. But I love this idea 0:10:33.920 --> 0:10:36.360 that this is an amazing image the Pope of Fire, 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:40.400 the hermit Pope of fire, barricaded in his castle, surrounded 0:10:40.400 --> 0:10:43.480 by fire at all times, sitting locked in this flaming 0:10:43.520 --> 0:10:48.240 court because he's essentially making his court mars right, his 0:10:48.240 --> 0:10:51.800 his his his environment is the mars that is burning 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:55.800 away the vapors that would otherwise invade his, his abode, 0:10:55.880 --> 0:10:57.960 and his body. Yeah, So for the rest of the 0:10:57.960 --> 0:11:01.040 episode today, we're going to be exploring this idea of 0:11:01.160 --> 0:11:04.040 the mi asthma hypothesis, or as it's often called, me 0:11:04.120 --> 0:11:07.839 asthma theory. We just recently had some discussions online about 0:11:07.960 --> 0:11:10.800 use of the word theory and hypothesis, so I'm sure 0:11:10.840 --> 0:11:13.600 it's not possible to to do it always right here, 0:11:13.679 --> 0:11:16.520 but but it's often called me asthma theory, even though 0:11:16.559 --> 0:11:20.640 it's not a very well evidence theory. All right, well, 0:11:20.720 --> 0:11:23.280 let's let's let's jump into the ne asthma. Let us 0:11:23.320 --> 0:11:26.400 allow the mi asthma to roll over us and and 0:11:26.440 --> 0:11:28.960 hopefully it won't turn us inside out or anything. Okay, 0:11:29.040 --> 0:11:32.000 oh yeah, that fog. Just one sniff of that fog 0:11:32.040 --> 0:11:34.280 and your inside out. You know, I could, I couldn't help, 0:11:34.280 --> 0:11:36.960 but think of our various fictions about fogs that turn 0:11:36.960 --> 0:11:40.840 you inside out, or or fogs that contain either space 0:11:40.920 --> 0:11:44.760 monsters or pirate zombies. Uh. We have a lot of 0:11:45.760 --> 0:11:52.520 interesting cultural ideas about the dangers of of strange gaseous 0:11:52.520 --> 0:11:55.959 bodies moving into our habitats. Well, there are good reasons 0:11:56.000 --> 0:11:58.880 to be afraid of fog, well, some types of fog. 0:11:58.920 --> 0:12:01.680 I mean, there was like the Great smog that killed 0:12:01.720 --> 0:12:04.560 so many people in London. That's just through you know, 0:12:04.679 --> 0:12:07.800 breathing bad particulates and stuff. But also of course it's 0:12:07.800 --> 0:12:09.839 a driving hazard and all that. I guess these are 0:12:09.880 --> 0:12:12.520 features of the modern world, not that's the medieval world. 0:12:12.559 --> 0:12:14.280 And if we're talking about the modern world, you also 0:12:14.320 --> 0:12:17.400 have to consider the Great War, World War One, in 0:12:17.440 --> 0:12:23.400 which we weaponized various gaseous agents, mastering this chemistry of death, uh, 0:12:23.640 --> 0:12:27.560 to to create a very real sort of miasma that 0:12:27.600 --> 0:12:31.040 would roll in and just feel you're dead in horrific ways. 0:12:31.080 --> 0:12:35.560 It's almost like, right after miasthma theory became obsolete, we 0:12:35.600 --> 0:12:39.839 started actually creating real miasmas. But we're getting ahead of 0:12:39.880 --> 0:12:42.840 ourselves here. So going back to history, throughout much of history, 0:12:42.960 --> 0:12:46.040 especially in the medieval period through like the mid nineteenth 0:12:46.080 --> 0:12:51.440 century in Europe, many supposed experts were absolutely convinced that 0:12:51.480 --> 0:12:56.319 the cause of the spread of disease was not tiny organisms, 0:12:56.360 --> 0:13:00.440 not germs, but the inhalation of something called night air 0:13:00.720 --> 0:13:04.480 or just bad air. There are million different names for it, 0:13:04.600 --> 0:13:08.559 the miasma containing the MIAs mata, so it was known 0:13:08.760 --> 0:13:12.000 as the miasma theory of disease, miasma coming from a 0:13:12.000 --> 0:13:16.199 Greek word that means to soil, corrupt, or pollute. Yeah, 0:13:16.280 --> 0:13:18.600 and this was this was a cornerstone. This is this 0:13:18.679 --> 0:13:21.720 wasn't just like popular idea of the time. This was 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:25.280 the cornerstone upon which a lot of additional understanding of 0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:27.320 the natural world was based. Yeah, this is what many 0:13:27.400 --> 0:13:30.120 experts believed. And the idea was so influential in the 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:34.280 history of epidemiology and study of disease that it still 0:13:34.400 --> 0:13:37.720 lingers in some of our modern terminology. Like think about 0:13:37.760 --> 0:13:44.040 the roots of the word malaria, mal meaning bad area, 0:13:44.160 --> 0:13:47.560 meaning air. The word malaria is made right out of 0:13:47.600 --> 0:13:51.400 the concept that the disease was caused by being exposed 0:13:51.440 --> 0:13:54.600 to certain types of air. Now, of course, we know 0:13:54.760 --> 0:13:57.839 today that malaria is a protozoan parasite. It's spread by 0:13:57.880 --> 0:14:00.920 mosquito bites, it gets in the blood. In fact, Charles 0:14:01.000 --> 0:14:04.360 Louis Alphonse lave Iran, the French physician who discovered the 0:14:04.400 --> 0:14:07.000 fact that malaria was caused by a parasitic organism in 0:14:07.040 --> 0:14:10.920 the blood, hated the word malaria, which in light of 0:14:10.960 --> 0:14:14.480 his discoveries, he considered to be totally an unscientific word 0:14:14.520 --> 0:14:18.040 that you shouldn't use. Instead, he liked the term palludism, 0:14:18.400 --> 0:14:23.520 meaning that's from Latin palace meaning swamp or marsh, making 0:14:23.520 --> 0:14:27.520 it something means something more like marsh disease or swamp syndrome. 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:31.960 And in fact paludisma is still the French word for 0:14:32.000 --> 0:14:34.480 the disease. It's at least a local victory for him 0:14:34.520 --> 0:14:36.920 on that front. Yeah, but here we are still like 0:14:37.240 --> 0:14:41.280 propagating mi asthma theory every time we say malaria. But 0:14:41.400 --> 0:14:44.520 some scholars believe the bad air, So like, where did 0:14:44.520 --> 0:14:46.840 the bad air come from? We've heard the idea that 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:49.840 it was astrological forces in the heavens, but there was 0:14:49.880 --> 0:14:52.920 also this idea that the bad air lay inside the earth, 0:14:53.080 --> 0:14:55.600 or in the soil or in the water, and they 0:14:55.600 --> 0:14:59.560 thought it could be released by volcanic eruptions or earthquakes 0:14:59.680 --> 0:15:02.360 or other types of things. In fact, there's a great 0:15:02.400 --> 0:15:06.440 passage where Shakespeare writes about the astrological version of the 0:15:07.360 --> 0:15:10.360 of the Miasma and troy Less and Cressida, where he says, 0:15:10.440 --> 0:15:14.440 quote a planetary plague, when Jove, meaning the planet Jupiter, 0:15:15.200 --> 0:15:18.320 will or some high vised city hang his poison in 0:15:18.360 --> 0:15:22.160 the sick air, when the planets an evil mixture to disorder? 0:15:22.280 --> 0:15:26.760 Wander what plagues? What portents? What mutiny? What raging of 0:15:26.800 --> 0:15:33.200 the sea? Shaking of earth? Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, diverting, crack, 0:15:33.680 --> 0:15:37.840 rend and derascinate the unity and married calm of states 0:15:37.960 --> 0:15:43.520 quite from their fixture. It's a total unity of destructive 0:15:43.560 --> 0:15:46.400 forces here, right, So he's combining this kind of like 0:15:46.960 --> 0:15:50.920 political chaos and disruption with the idea that the planet 0:15:51.000 --> 0:15:54.760 Jupiter will do something to the air to put vapors 0:15:54.800 --> 0:15:57.840 in it and poison people and bring plagues. But the 0:15:57.920 --> 0:16:01.080 most common version we see throughout his story is not 0:16:01.560 --> 0:16:04.720 so much the idea that it's something deep in the 0:16:04.760 --> 0:16:07.120 earth that gets released or something that gets you know, 0:16:07.200 --> 0:16:09.920 poorted down from the sky from Jupiter or Mars, or 0:16:09.960 --> 0:16:14.320 Jupiter Mars interacting, but it's the idea that the particles 0:16:14.360 --> 0:16:19.280 in the air, the miasma, are caused by decay, it's decomposition. 0:16:19.360 --> 0:16:23.840 Any rotting or decomposing organic matter was believed by miasma 0:16:23.880 --> 0:16:28.720 theorist to release these tiny particles of pollution or miasmata, 0:16:29.040 --> 0:16:32.680 which could be identified by the presence of a foul smell. 0:16:33.280 --> 0:16:36.960 In fact, this idea was so influential that there were 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:40.640 places where there was this miasthma that informed things like 0:16:40.760 --> 0:16:44.640 where you would put cities like the first century BC 0:16:44.880 --> 0:16:48.640 Roman architect Vitruvius wrote a treatise on architecture, including a 0:16:48.680 --> 0:16:51.720 section on how to site the founding of a new town, 0:16:52.240 --> 0:16:55.800 and he took miasma theory into consideration as a public 0:16:55.840 --> 0:16:59.200 health concern when thinking about where you should put your towns. 0:16:59.280 --> 0:17:02.240 He wrote, quote in setting out the walls of a city, 0:17:02.280 --> 0:17:05.480 the choice of a healthy situation is of the first importance. 0:17:05.880 --> 0:17:09.000 It should be on high ground, neither subject to fogs 0:17:09.080 --> 0:17:13.200 nor rains. Its aspects should be neither violently hot nor 0:17:13.280 --> 0:17:17.520 intensely cold, but temperate. In both respects. The neighborhood of 0:17:17.560 --> 0:17:21.160 a marshy place must be avoided, for in such a sight, 0:17:21.280 --> 0:17:24.520 the morning air uniting with the fogs that rise in 0:17:24.560 --> 0:17:27.560 the neighborhood will reach the city with the rising sun, 0:17:27.920 --> 0:17:31.320 and these fogs and mists, charged with the exhalation of 0:17:31.359 --> 0:17:36.199 the finny animals, will diffuse and unwholesome effluvia over the 0:17:36.240 --> 0:17:40.480 bodies of the inhabitants and render the place pestilent. Well 0:17:40.480 --> 0:17:44.159 that's just common sense. But again we given the idea 0:17:44.240 --> 0:17:46.880 that this was a kind of a corner stone understanding 0:17:46.880 --> 0:17:49.160 of the world, and you can definitely see. I mean, 0:17:49.240 --> 0:17:53.440 even even Lavaron wanted it to be called wanted malaria 0:17:53.520 --> 0:17:56.560 to be called something like marsh sickness or swamp disease, 0:17:57.000 --> 0:17:59.480 not because he thought it was caused by bad air 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:01.639 coming off the swamps, but knew that it was. You 0:18:01.680 --> 0:18:05.840 know where these mosquitoes that delivered the disease dwell that 0:18:05.920 --> 0:18:08.440 it is most likely to infect you. So there they 0:18:08.480 --> 0:18:12.439 were identifying some kind of relevant factors there. It is 0:18:12.480 --> 0:18:16.320 probably good if you are taking public health into consideration, 0:18:16.400 --> 0:18:18.840 not to build your city in a swamp or next 0:18:18.880 --> 0:18:21.080 to a marsh where it's going to be having all 0:18:21.080 --> 0:18:23.560 these mosquitoes come in to give you the marsh fever, 0:18:24.240 --> 0:18:27.720 but they didn't have the mechanism correctly identified. All right, 0:18:27.760 --> 0:18:29.359 on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and 0:18:29.359 --> 0:18:31.520 when we come back, we're going to continue to discuss 0:18:31.840 --> 0:18:37.160 the history of my asthma theory. Thank alright, we're back. 0:18:37.680 --> 0:18:42.000 So I wonder if mi asthma beliefs might be older 0:18:42.000 --> 0:18:45.560 than history itself, because you find me asthma type writings 0:18:45.560 --> 0:18:48.040 when you go way back into history, it seemed like 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:52.040 it was already established this idea that certain types of 0:18:52.080 --> 0:18:56.159 air and vapors caused diseases. Like around four b C. 0:18:56.480 --> 0:18:59.560 The Greek physician Hippocrates was writing about malaria, which was, 0:19:00.040 --> 0:19:02.639 as we've said, was already you know, named after bad 0:19:02.720 --> 0:19:05.600 air uh, and it was known by many different names 0:19:05.640 --> 0:19:07.760 back then, such as like the marsh fevers or the 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:11.160 agg use. And in a text called on Airs, Waters 0:19:11.160 --> 0:19:14.600 and Places, Hippocrates wrote about how certain environments and seasons 0:19:15.040 --> 0:19:19.240 carried air that could communicate different diseases. Well, yeah, I 0:19:19.240 --> 0:19:22.159 mean I think I think something worth driving home is 0:19:22.200 --> 0:19:25.359 that the truthiness of the theory does seem to closely 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:28.919 align with our basic instincts to feel discussed and avoid 0:19:28.960 --> 0:19:33.040 certain odors, at least until the source of those odors 0:19:33.040 --> 0:19:36.080 are better understood. I mean, don't hang around the latrine 0:19:36.119 --> 0:19:40.119 fields is solid advice? Were repelled? Uh, And that repulsion 0:19:40.200 --> 0:19:43.600 serves as a sort of physiological safety net. But the 0:19:43.720 --> 0:19:46.800 bad air that communicates to us the potential dangers of 0:19:46.840 --> 0:19:50.320 such a place are not necessarily the cause of the dangers. 0:19:50.320 --> 0:19:52.480 Sort of like blaming your phone for all the robo 0:19:52.520 --> 0:19:55.640 calls you're getting. Science, you know, often challenges us to 0:19:55.840 --> 0:19:58.560 think in a way that goes beyond the evolved reactions 0:19:58.560 --> 0:20:02.600 of the biological human. Yeah, exactly. Blaming the air is 0:20:02.680 --> 0:20:05.000 kind of a shooting the messenger thing, Yeah it is. 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:07.560 But of course, as we've been discussing here, this was 0:20:07.600 --> 0:20:10.879 an idea that not only gained traction but remained in 0:20:11.000 --> 0:20:13.520 play for a very long period of time. I was 0:20:13.560 --> 0:20:16.680 reading from a book titled The Scented Ape, The Biology 0:20:16.680 --> 0:20:20.600 and Culture of Human Odor by David Michael Stoddart and 0:20:20.840 --> 0:20:24.240 the author in this point uh to the the idea 0:20:24.440 --> 0:20:27.240 that bad odors, you know, causing disease. That this goes back, 0:20:27.440 --> 0:20:32.520 he says, through two key physicians. There's the Arabian physician 0:20:32.920 --> 0:20:35.879 have A Sina who lived nine eight through ten thirty seven, 0:20:36.400 --> 0:20:39.840 who noted that the odor of urine changed during sickness 0:20:40.200 --> 0:20:43.240 and could be used to diagnose the illness. And of 0:20:43.280 --> 0:20:46.199 course this is sound, but the observation caused others of 0:20:46.240 --> 0:20:49.200 the time to develop the idea that these odors were 0:20:49.240 --> 0:20:53.199 the cause of the disease and their expulsion was the 0:20:53.240 --> 0:20:56.240 illness leaving the body. So the strange smell in the 0:20:56.400 --> 0:21:00.480 urine that was the sickness leaving the patient. Yeah, you 0:21:00.480 --> 0:21:02.679 can find parallels to this type of thinking and all 0:21:02.800 --> 0:21:06.280 kinds of things, like what about the idea that sometimes 0:21:06.320 --> 0:21:10.399 illnesses cause diarrhea and vomiting. That you could look at 0:21:10.440 --> 0:21:12.600 that and say, oh, okay, so and so is sick. 0:21:12.720 --> 0:21:15.240 What we need to do is give them enemas and 0:21:15.320 --> 0:21:18.400 induced vomiting to purge all that stuff out that's making 0:21:18.440 --> 0:21:21.680 them sick. But in fact that doesn't always help somebody 0:21:21.720 --> 0:21:23.439 who's sick. Most of the time, you don't want to 0:21:23.440 --> 0:21:26.240 do that. Yeah, you're you're taking Yeah, you're you're, you're 0:21:26.280 --> 0:21:30.119 you're recognizing like an actual bodily function and the purpose 0:21:30.160 --> 0:21:32.480 behind that bodily function. But then you're you're taking it 0:21:32.520 --> 0:21:37.560 too far, your misunderstanding the cause now. Startard also points 0:21:37.600 --> 0:21:41.280 to the Greek physician Galen several hundred years earlier, who 0:21:41.280 --> 0:21:44.199 correctly judged that odors were perceived in the brain, but 0:21:44.359 --> 0:21:48.160 he also incorrectly judged that they gained direct accents access 0:21:48.160 --> 0:21:51.800 to the center of the brain via hollow olfactory nerves, 0:21:52.359 --> 0:21:55.600 despite Aristotle's previous argument that scent receptors were in the 0:21:55.720 --> 0:21:59.239 lining of the nose. Galen's theory survived for more than 0:21:59.280 --> 0:22:04.160 a millennium, and Studdard also points out that English judges 0:22:04.200 --> 0:22:06.960 as late as the nineteenth century would still take bunches 0:22:06.960 --> 0:22:10.200 of sweet smelling flowers with them on jail visits to 0:22:10.359 --> 0:22:14.359 ward off jail fever, which was what they called typhus. 0:22:15.200 --> 0:22:18.399 But typhus incidentally is caused by a bacterium spread by 0:22:18.440 --> 0:22:23.080 body lice, fleas, or chiggers to the plague. Yeah so, 0:22:23.160 --> 0:22:26.439 but it's another example of people, even in the nineteenth 0:22:26.480 --> 0:22:31.520 century still having a miasmic understanding, or at least on 0:22:31.280 --> 0:22:36.879 a superficial level um of disease. No, miasma theory was 0:22:36.880 --> 0:22:40.320 still absolutely in full swing in Europe in the nineteenth century. 0:22:40.320 --> 0:22:42.640 I mean, it wasn't untill late in the nineteenth century 0:22:42.640 --> 0:22:46.840 that we really we really got a beat down on it. Now. 0:22:46.880 --> 0:22:49.960 In researching this, I also looked back to Virginia Smith's 0:22:49.960 --> 0:22:53.840 excellent book clean A History of Personal Hygiene Impurity, which 0:22:54.200 --> 0:22:57.560 is a faculous read. She'd basically throughout the book charts 0:22:57.600 --> 0:23:01.359 how humans have always had this this understanding of what 0:23:01.520 --> 0:23:05.080 is personal hygiene and then what is sort of moral 0:23:05.200 --> 0:23:09.199 or spiritual hygiene, uh, and and how these become just 0:23:09.480 --> 0:23:13.600 entertangled throughout history. Cleanliness is Godliness, yeah, exactly, And it's 0:23:13.680 --> 0:23:17.400 it's a delightful book along those lines. But she talks 0:23:17.400 --> 0:23:20.439 a little bit about miasthma. The idea that it's was 0:23:20.520 --> 0:23:23.600 seen by the Greeks is this this dirt that caused disease, 0:23:24.000 --> 0:23:27.840 the dirt of destruction. Uh. And it could be supposedly 0:23:27.840 --> 0:23:31.240 generated in any place at any time, for any divine reason, 0:23:31.640 --> 0:23:34.959 but was generally associated with like a foul setting, you know, 0:23:35.040 --> 0:23:37.639