What you believe about the causes of disease has an enormous impact on how you live your life. Going Viral is an immersive, interactive exhibit space that invites you to think about how people at different points in history have understood and tried to avoid sickness.
See the exhibit at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.
The “miasma” theory of disease held that putrefying organic matter released disease-causing particles into the air. Public health inspectors tasked with locating the source of a cholera outbreak were literally following their noses. Of course, the worst-smelling parts of the city were also the places most likely to contain housing for working-class people, and, as this cartoon from Puck suggests, inspection regimes intended to “protect the public” often amounted in practice to policies of official harassment.
Lithograph, 1832. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY