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

They were interning at a local dance studio, teaching yoga to kids and unsteadily emerging from a miasma of childhood depression.

From New York Times ● Mar. 20, 2024

But as they rode through the streets of the Xi city, it became clear that the same miasma was affecting everyone.

From "Huntress" by Malinda Lo

Unlike today, when scientists know that disease is spread by microorganisms, Victorian Englishmen thought it was spread by "miasmas," or "bad air."

From Salon ● Jul. 25, 2023

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

It was not difficult, then, to accept the idea that foul-smelling toilets, drains, and the huge piles of horse manure that lined city streets harbored dangerous bacteria instead of miasmas.

From Salon ● May 21, 2012

They were delirious miasmas dissipated by the sun and daylight of companionship.

From The Law of Hemlock Mountain by Hugh Lundsford

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

The air, purer and less charged with miasmata and heterogeneous emanations, becomes at the same time drier.

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

Marsh miasmata are generally the cause of intermittent fevers.

From James Cutbush An American Chemist, 1788-1823 by Edgar Fahs Smith

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

Ancient philosophers seem to have believed, that the contagious miasmata in their warm climates affected horses and dogs previous to mankind.

From Zoonomia, Vol. II Or, the Laws of Organic Life by Erasmus Darwin