miasma

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

Maddow then segued into a more comprehensive discussion about the rule of law, which she argued was not an abstract "miasma" but rather, is "specific stuff."

From Salon ● May 7, 2024

The reek was so great that the other servants slept on the floor in the house rather than endure the miasma near their pallets.

From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party" by M.T. Anderson

So when an epidemic gets underway, we don’t waste time on sacrifices to propitiate angry gods or fretting about deadly miasmas seeping in with the night air.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 28, 2020

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

From The Guardian ● Sep. 8, 2018

Soon germs became even more frightening than miasmas.

From Salon ● May 21, 2012

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

Yet the horror and reek of those two days in the miasmas still clung in his memory, even in his nostrils, he sometimes imagined.

From Caravans By Night A Romance of India by Harry Hervey

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 lungs thus become a ready inlet to contagion, miasmata, and other poisonous influences diffused through the air we breathe.

From Popular Education For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes by Ira Mayhew

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 lake, the waters of which appear yellow by transmitted light, is dry in the season of great heat, and the Indians themselves are unable to resist the miasmata rising from the mud.

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

A film of foreign substance on the skin will inevitably become the seat of detention of miasmata and infectious vapors.

From A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) by Calvin Cutter