miasma

• “Again, exposition; but a key thing to consider: the Greek concept of miasma is at play here.”

  More on Prologues

• “I find the best way to address this miasma is with a high-end programmable universal remote.”

  Controlling the Living Room - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

• “Micael Ewans, The Everyman Library, 1996), miasma is defined as: "Pollution; the word embraces both literal dirt and what we would call psychic pollution incurred by breaches of taboo, e.e. bloodshed.”

  Archive 2006-02-01

• “It is impossible to have such an awful sewer of iniquity sending up its miasma, which is wafted by the winds north, south, east, and west, without the whole land being affected by it.”

  The Wedding Ring A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony

• “In areas where there are monsters milling about, a dark vortex -- known as the miasma stream -- needs to be sealed to prevent more monsters from appearing.”

  GameSpot's News, Screenshots, Movies, Reviews, Previews, Downloads, and Features

• “Actually I think there is scope here for investigating nomology as a non-scientific sense of possibility, investigating the way beliefs in Natural, Social or Divine order might also have functioned (and might still do) to construct "laws of reality" -- looking at the ancient concept of "miasma" as a breaching of those laws, for example, and a breaching that is integral to the narratives of Greek Tragedy.”

  A Follow Up

• “Doubtful that communicable diseases spread via "miasma"; that is, through the inhalation of "bad" air -- yet faced with a scientific community still skeptical of modern germ theory and pathology -- John Snow first proposed the idea that cholera was spread by a waterborne pathogen in 1849.”

  Lapham's Quarterly: A Bilious Situation

• “It was the first time a city had grown so big, and while it had a rudimentary idea of a public health system, this system was based on the "miasma" theory of disease: that illness was the result of smelling bad smells.”

  Boing Boing: November 26, 2006 - December 2, 2006 Archives

• “The idea of the "miasma", the metaphoric association of morality with dirt, disease, infection, an "evil influence", was with us even in the supposedly more enlightened secular field of medicine, right up until micro-biology made it obsolete.”

  The Stain of Sin

• “Given that the notion of being morally unclean goes back at least to the Hittites, and that the Greeks had their own version in the shape of "miasma", I smell a root metaphor here, one shared by polytheist and monotheist cultures alike.”

  The Stain of Sin

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