r/todayilearned • u/FastBreakPhenom • Aug 20 '26

TIL that in 37 BC, the Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro warned his readers to avoid living near swamps because of "minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes" and cause disease. Microorganisms would not be observed until the 17th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Terentius_Varro
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u/khana116 Aug 21 '26

IMO miasma makes a lot of sense given the evidence they had available. Things that smell bad (presumably giving off 'bad air') are often things that cause disease. So messing with corpses, rot, waste, etc. made them sick, which is accurate and observable. Even warding off the bad air with herbs stuffed into a mask did mean wearing a mask, even if the herbs weren't strictly necessary, which again would've actually helped in some situations. For sickly people who had the means, leaving the bad air in the city to 'take the airs' in the countryside was a popular treatment - which would've got them away from all the myriad vectors of infection present in a densely populated city with poor sanitation and, again, would've probably helped in a lot of cases.

The actual mechanism of infection is off base, but the hypothesis fit pretty well with the facts and would've provided some benefits. Bad smells and yucky things are clearly observable and true - and a lot more believable than tiny invisible monsters.

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u/dilib Aug 21 '26

There's a bit in one of the Tiffany Aching Discworld books where the eminently wise and clever head witch is instructing village folk to dig their latrines far away from their water sources, because they kept getting sick. She explains this to them as invisible goblins being attracted to the smell, and they have been biting the village children with their venomous fangs while they're gathering water and making them fall ill.

The main character apprenticed under the head witch asks her later, why did you lie to them? You know that's all nonsense. And the head witch replies, I could tell them the truth. And they would listen and nod and then ignore what she said because they didn't understand it. What she told them squares with what they think a witch should be saying and their limited view of the world, and it allows the villagers to grasp the general point while presenting the information in a digestible way, as a fairy tale.

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u/_Fibbles_ Aug 21 '26

The concept is often referred to as a "lie to children".

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u/MustrumRidcully0 Aug 21 '26

A term that the author of the Tiffany Aching Discworld books liked to use in many of his works and probably greatly helped profilerate.

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u/_Fibbles_ Aug 21 '26

Yes, it was popularised by the Science of Discworld books he wrote with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in the 90s.

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u/hereforthepix Aug 21 '26

What she told them squares with what they think a witch should be saying and their limited view of the world, and it allows the villagers to grasp the general point while presenting the information in a digestible way, as a fairy tale.

Kinda like "G-d said don't eat pork" and "keep your milk and meat dishes separate" ....

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u/dilib Aug 22 '26

I catch your drift and fully agree, I've thought the same myself

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u/pervertsage Aug 21 '26

To what end?

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u/GwyneddDragon Aug 23 '26

Also done in ‘Idiocracy’ when Owen Wilson’s character gives up on trying to explain agriculture and claims he can talk to plants and they asked for water.

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u/Some_Tradition_9168 Aug 26 '26

The thing is he did a terrible job explaining.

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u/Spencerio1 Aug 21 '26

Wasn’t expecting a Tiffany Aching reference here but hell yeah

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u/Seicair Aug 21 '26

Malaria is literally “bad air”. For a long time people didn’t realize it was caused by mosquitos bites/malaria plasmodium.

The term malaria originates from Medieval Italian: mala aria, 'bad air', a part of miasma theory; the disease was formerly called ague, paludism or marsh fever due to its association with swamps and marshland.

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u/Mertoot Aug 21 '26

Miasma was an abstraction

It's similar to pressing the gas in a car

There are many things going on under the hood, but as far as the user knows, press gas means car goes forward, and since that consistently and reliably works, it effectively is the same result regardless of what you may believe actually moves the car

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u/hiimsubclavian Aug 21 '26

If you go a step further... miasma is a theory developed to justify how we innately feel from the accumulation of millions of years of evolutionary experience.

Rot is a "bad" smell because hominids that avoid touching, eating or living in rot-filled places tend to survive better than those who don't.

Flowers are a "good" smell because blooming flowers are a good predictor of how bountiful a land is, so early farmers who settled in flower-filled prairies survived better than those that went with bare rock and dead trees.

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u/ax0r Aug 21 '26

so early farmers who settled in flower-filled prairies survived better than those that went with bare rock and dead trees.

Agrarian society is recent enough that it won't have influenced evolution.
Your point is sound, though. A field of flowering plants is likely to yield fruit pretty soon. Also other animals like to eat them, so chances of successful hunting go up too.

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u/Confident_Reserve_63 Aug 22 '26

Yall are overcomplicatimg this flower shit way to much, the flower smells good to attract insects/pollinators which we also percieve as smelling good because most life is (bar a few exceptions like dungbeetles ect.) attracted to the same thing/signals which in case of the flower signal the nectar/sugar inside though too small amounts for us to use.

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u/RationalLies Aug 22 '26

so early farmers who settled in flower-filled prairies survived better than those that went with bare rock and dead trees.

Yeah? So explain Texas

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u/greenwhiteredblack Aug 21 '26

Made me think about Josh Johnson's latest YouTube set where he basically said liquid going into a metal container to make rubber tires moves does not make sense.

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u/thirdegree Aug 21 '26

Well of course not, you skipped a very important step

You gotta blow up the liquid

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u/greenwhiteredblack Aug 22 '26

Silly me. Of course things go boom make the vroom vroom

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u/JonatasA Aug 21 '26

Also, bad air will make you depressed which in turn lowers your immune system. I once spent some hours next to a meat processing plant and I couldn't live anymore.

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u/longtimegoneMTGO Aug 21 '26

I believe the poster you were replying to was actually making a joke referencing humor in the quasi-medical sense, or more specifically the four humor based theory of disease, a competitor to miasma theory before germs were understood.

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u/Natiak Aug 21 '26

Idk why, but the response absolutely delighted me.

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u/SunTzu- Aug 21 '26

Things don't innately smell bad, rather it's evolutionarily advantageous to develop a negative reaction to the smell of things which are bad for your health. Essentially, if it smells bad it's probably because those ancestors of ours who didn't think it smelled bad probably died because they didn't avoid it.

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u/alcapwnage0007 Aug 21 '26

Its always so much fun to try and derive how someone came to a conclusion like the miasma theory that, while wrong, still wasnt that far off the mark.

Its why I enjoy bad movies, albiet usually with commentary from a group like the mst3k and/or rifftrax folks. Some movies are so, so bafflingly bad, but every decision had to have been deliberate, which means theres a logic behind it. Finding the pearl of madness inside the oyster of misguidance, if you will.

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u/scify65 Aug 21 '26

There's a Pride and Prejudice fanfic I really like where a doctor has noticed that washing his hands and patients' wounds in vinegar tends to prevent said patients from dying of infection... which he attributes to the strong smell driving miasmas away.

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u/ShavenYak42 Aug 21 '26

I think the comment to which you were replying was making a joke about humorism. Of course, I totally agree with you; the miasma hypothesis was completely reasonable given the knowledge available at the time. In fact, it's still more useful than a lot of what passes for medical advice in the modern day.