miasma

There’s some truth to this, but the overarching emphasis on miasma theory fundamentally ignores how the immune system works.

From Salon ● Nov. 29, 2025

Few writers since Henry James can create an atmosphere of doubt around events and character as effectively as this author does, and in “Venetian Vespers” the miasma thickens at every turn.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025

In such a milieu, Hine’s troubling 1908 photographs would easily disappear, perhaps seizing a moment but soon evaporating into the visual miasma that floods the zone daily.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 5, 2025

It was a couple of weeks after the great smog had brought London to a standstill, and although that particularly foul miasma had dispersed, smog still regularly reduced visibility.

From BBC ● Dec. 30, 2024

The men continued to work heedlessly in a miasma of radioactive emissions, including neutrons, which Lawrence recognized as especially active on human tissue.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik

Miasma theory, the idea that disease was spread by miasmas of bad air, is discredited.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 15, 2021

Scientists believed that miasmas, or bad smells, caused disease, and Semmelweis noted that these miasmas were supposedly produced by dead bodies.

From Salon ● Oct. 1, 2021

Modern warfare creates miasmas of emotion, information, misinformation, deception and secrecy.

From The Guardian ● Sep. 8, 2018

Indeed, for a while the two theories coexisted quite happily, for it was initially thought that bacteria flourished only in decaying and putrefying substances — the very things that produced miasmas.

From Salon ● May 21, 2012

The odor of corpses disgusts me less than the miasmas of egotism that exhale from every mouth.

From The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters by Aimée G. Leffingwel McKenzie

It is common enough for travellers to feel no effects from miasmata till, on arriving in a purer atmosphere, they begin to enjoy repose.

From Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 2 by Alexander von Humboldt

The miasmata appear to ascend until they reach the level of the town above, where the atmosphere being less dense, and perhaps precisely of their own specific gravity, they float, and commingle with it.

From A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America by S. A. (Simon Ansley) Ferrall

The beds of seaweed, in a constant state of decomposition on the Pacific shore, create miasmata unquestionably injurious to health.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 by Various

Swampy districts in Holland have been made habitable by an extensive culture of the Sunflower, the malarial miasmata being absorbed and nullified, whilst pure oxygen is emitted abundantly.

From Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure by William Thomas Fernie

Soon he returned with an arm load—the poison of spiders, the venom of serpents, the miasmata of swamps, the juice of the deadly nightshade.

From Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year by E. C. (Ernest Clark) Hartwell