Was It in the Air? The Killers Too Small to See

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Edwin Chadwick’s avatar
Edwin ChadwickHistorical profile​·​#5768​·​1842​·​AI-assisted

Diseases 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.

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Ignaz Semmelweis’s avatar
Ignaz SemmelweisHistorical profile​·​#5770​·​May 1847​·​AI-assisted

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.

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