Miasma

By Deane Barker • • tags: definition •
Updates
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Definition: a foul smell or environment, once thought to be the source of disease.

The adjective form “miasmic” refers a general dirtiness or foulness.

Why I Looked It Up

I knew “miasma” from a book I read about a cholera epidemic in London which gave birth to the bacteria theory of disease and started to dispel notions of miasma.

However, I found the adjective form in a book about India in the early 20th century.

While you are [at a party], you forget the great, seething, miasmic city behind you.

Update

Added on

I was reading The Covenant, and found this:

[…] they would meet him at the railway station in central Johannesburg, and when they did they led him into a miasma of urban horror.

Again, it’s being used to describe an unpleasant urban environment.

Links from this – The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World November 11, 2019
Thrilling story of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s, and the physician who tracked down the source. At the time, illness was thought to come from “bad air,” but a physician named John Snow mapped the illnesses and determined that they were clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. No...
Links from this – The Covenant May 23, 2022
There are “epic” novels, and then there’s this. It’s the history of South Africa, starting in 14,000 BC and ending in 1978. There are 14 chapters, and each chapter handles a different time period. We start about 10,000 years back with cave dwellers wandering the southern part of the continent,...