| Popis: |
This chapter focuses on illness causation and the varying modes of explanation, both professional and lay, which have been offered over the centuries. Medical and lay explanations of illness have long attributed importance to air, climate and seasons. The disposition of the air was malignant, full of thunder, storms, sudden rain and tempests, symbolising the humours of the century, carried off large numbers of people of all ages, sex and condition. The corpuscular theory, reformulated by Phillipe Hecquet as the theory of miasmas, is a contagionist theory. Others speak of the 'pestilential seed' or blame an epidemic on living creatures, such as worms or insects. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hygienists had envisaged combined action, although rather imprecise in its processes, of various factors in the environment, ranging from material elements to social conditions. The new bacteriology focused on the ultimate and decisive link, the germ, in triggering off disease. |
