Miasma theory

This chapter first outlines the miasma theory of disease, the influence model of harm and our current model of pollution, focusing on each model s internal architecture and physical form its agency, or mechanism of harm and its geography, or the spatial relations within bodies and the spaces outside of them. It then compares the two models with the phenomenon of plastic body burdens. Each model generates modes and points of intervention, and I argue that the miasma theory provides better representations, and thereby more appropriate interventions for mitigating the effects of bodily plastic pollution, than current dominant models and solutions. 

Bloom, B.L. (1965) The Medical Model , Miasma Theory, and Community Mental Health , Community Mental Health Journal 1(4) 333-38. 

The Royal Society s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900 lists nearly fifty papers by Smith, of which about thirty relate to aspects of water and air quality. When Smith began his researches sanitary science was not perceived as a systematic and coherent body of knowledge that could be applied to the alleviation of environmental problems, but rather as a collection of interesting but unrelated experimental results. His researches concentrated on the physical and chemical conditions of air and water and the effects of inorganic impurities, rather than on the disease-carrying aspects, where the miasma theory of disease was dominant. 

Lockyer s studies of the solar spectrum revealed to him that the sun is a miasma of chemical elements. Where did they come from In 1873 Lockyer developed the theory, later expounded in his Chemistry of the Sun (1887), that in the hottest (blue-white) stars the stellar matter is broken apart into the constituents of atoms themselves subatomieparticles, the protyle discussed by Dumas. Then, as the stars cooled, these particles combined to form regular elements - including some, like helium, not (then) known on Earth. 

Before the late nineteenth century, disease was perceived to be caused by bad air , or miasmas. By the turn of the twentieth century, the miasmic model of harm had been replaced by germ theory. Within 40 years, a model of pollution developed that privileged linear causal links between a discrete pollutant and its pollution, and the quantification of harm. 

Miasmas exemplify what I call the influence model of harm, in contrast to the particle model of harm used today that describes the actions of discrete pollutants. Models, as Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison (1999) explain in Models as Mediators, provide us with a tool for investigation, giving the user the potential to learn about the world or about theories or both because of their characteristics of autonomy and representational power, and their... 

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