The Covid-19 pandemic has, almost inevitably, exposed important differences in writing about the history of disease. Is this a narrative driven by a desire to win an argument in the present or is it intended to reconstruct the thinking of the past in its own terms?…
This clash is particularly evident in the disputes about airborne transmission of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. There has been a debate for the last 50 years or so among physicists who work on air about the nature and size of the particles involved in respiratory infection. Broadly speaking, this can be characterized as ‘aerosols’ versus ‘droplets’…
One way in which the aerosol faction have tried to consolidate their position is by arguing that they are the legitimate heirs to past work that has been inappropriately dismissed. The droplet faction are anxious not to be seen as miasmatists, continuing a discredited 18th and 19th century approach that focussed on ‘bad air’. The aerosol faction argue that this theory was largely correct, even if poorly expressed, and reach even further back to the place of air in Ancient Greek and Roman medicine…
A key text for this is a manuscript, Airs, Waters, Places, which forms part of a collection known as the Hippocratic Corpus, written by various authors well after the time of Hippocrates himself…
Claiming ancient medicine as a legitimator of a contemporary position is one way to develop a creation myth. It invokes symbols that still carry prestige in the Western world, where a knowledge of Ancient Latin and Greek language and culture is associated with the education of some elite groups…