The belief that disease resulted from “pestilential air,” known today as the miasma theory, dominated medicine for centuries. This idea originated with ancient Greeks like Hippocrates, who connected health to environmental factors. During the Middle Ages, catastrophic epidemics like the Black Death were often blamed on a “corruption of the air,” which some believed was caused by planetary alignments or earthquakes releasing toxic fumes from the earth. The primary defense was not to fight germs,