The word miasma

Words die, like all the rest. All, in reality, end up dying: only that some die en masse due to the extinction of a culture - of a language - and others die alone because they have already lived. A

is the hundredth of a

-528 square -

meters, but nobody says it neither knows; a

or a

are closer, but neither. Some are replaced by others that fulfill their function; others represent objects or behaviors that are no longer, and are forgotten. The word

— neither my soul nor my weapon,

— agonizes, and yet it had so much life, it ended with so many.

Miasma comes from the Greek, like almost everything, and it meant stain, pollution: a murderous vapor. More than 2,000 years ago Hippocrates explained that those evil airs, the product of "diseased bodies, corrupt matters or stagnant waters", were what made him sick. Miasmas were more fearsome because they were not seen, they acted silently, they entered the body by contact or by breathing — and they killed you. The pests were just that: miasma jumble in the air, the fatal aspiration. The miasmas lived so long. It was they who killed a third of Europeans in the Black Death of 1348, three-quarters of Americans in 1550, more than millions over the centuries. It was what the few doctors explained, fighting those superstitions that said that so much death was the punishment of some god that was awake.From that aerial presence of miasmas comes the name of a disease that continues to kill half a million Africans every year:

"Bad air, in Italian."

The miasmas survived until the beginning of modernity: they are, for example, the cause of the Eixample.

In the 19th century they caused a scientific trend called hygienism and they thought that the solution to many diseases was to get people to stop breathing in them and breathe clean air instead.

The Eixample of Barcelona, ​​with its generous streets and apple cores, is the result of that idea — and it is a good example of correct action with wrong theory.

Sanitizing cities did not eliminate miasmas that did not exist, but infectious sources that contaminated spaces, waters, lives.

The last great massacre of the miasmas was the yellow fever that decimated Buenos Aires in 1871. Then, desperate, the neighbors lit fires to burn those evil airs. Ten years later, in Havana, they attacked again, but then a non-judgmental doctor jumped into battle. Carlos Finlay was the son of an Englishman and a Cuban who had studied in France and the United States; When the fever struck Cuba, he was the first to think that a mosquito, the

, was carrying it.

, that it carried an infectious virus from one person to another —and that to combat it, the sick had to be isolated and the mosquitoes exterminated. The virus idea was also very new and his colleagues laughed at him for 20 years; At the beginning of the 20th century mainstream scientists understood it, listened to it, controlled yellow fever.

And little by little they were accepting that the miasmas had never existed.

Yet for millennia, they were there, they killed and they killed.

When we put together an idea of ​​the world we live in that idea;

that it is false does not make it less present: that is what we believe, that is what we know, that is how miasmas and gods live.

Millions died convinced that these airs were killing them: they were no less real to them than viruses to any of us.

They were convinced as we are convinced;

They believed in their science as we believe in ours: that ours considers theirs to be wrong does not guarantee that others, in some future, will not think the same of all that which now seems as true to us as miasmas to them.

For this reason, doubting is the watchword: for that, among other things, there is science — and words.