From miasma to asthma: the changing fortunes of medical geography in America

Abstract

Historians of modern medicine often divide their subject into two parts, separated by the bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth century, when medicine supposedly became 'scientific' for the first time. The history of medical geography--to say nothing of other subjects--calls this common view into question. At least in the United States, students of medical geography, arguably the pre-eminent medical science in an age dominated by miasmatic theories of disease, readily adapted to the discovery of germs. And although bacteriology quickly eclipsed medical geography in the world of medicine, place remained an important consideration in treating asthma (and allergies generally) throughout the post-bacteriological period.