Before there were germs, there was miasma. Bad air. Billows rolling off the bogs and fens. The stench of swamp gas. The rot of ferns and trees fallen to decay in stagnant pools. Fetid. Rancid. Odoriferous.
When I was a boy going out to play in January, my mother told me not to stay out too long or I’d catch a chill. By then, germ theory had been with us for a century. My mother made us drink pasteurized milk so she should have known better: you can’t catch a cold from the cold. My mother was repeating to me what her mother had repeated to her from her mother before, a woman disinclined to think about the new science because it came from a Frenchman and everybody knows you can’t trust the French.
What’s the French word for miasma?
