Was It in the Air? The Killers Too Small to See
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See chronicleDiseases like cholera and fevers come from miasma: bad air given off by rotting filth, sewage, and swamps. Clean away the filth and its smell, and the disease goes with it.
Childbed fever kills mothers four times as often in the doctors’ clinic as in the midwives’ clinic next door, though both breathe the same air. Since the doctors began washing their hands in chlorine after dissecting corpses, deaths have fallen from 18 in a hundred births to 2. The cause comes on the doctors’ hands, not from the air both clinics share.
The Broad Street outbreak’s deaths cluster around one pump, and those spared drank other water: the workhouse its own well, the brewery’s men their beer. Bad air would have spared no one in the same streets.
Where two water companies supply the same streets, houses drinking Thames water taken below London’s sewers lose more than eight times as many people to cholera as houses drinking water taken above them. Same streets, same air, different water.
In my wards, 16 of 35 patients died after amputations before I began killing germs with carbolic acid, and 6 of 40 since. The air is the same as before; only the germs are gone.
Anthrax comes from one particular germ. Grown outside any animal for eight generations, it still gives mice anthrax. Its spores survive in the soil for years, which is why some pastures stay deadly, whatever their air.
Guinea pigs breathing air from a tuberculosis ward caught the disease. With ultraviolet light killing the germs in the same air, they didn’t. It’s the germs in the air that spread disease, not the air itself.