Word: miasma
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...center of his tale is John Snow, the doctor who overcame the medical establishment's entrenched belief that cholera lurked in the city's "miasma," its bad air, and proved the true cause by painstakingly charting the contagion against London's water supply. The resulting map provided a founding case study for epidemiology. But as readers of previous books by Johnson might expect - among them Mind Wide Open and last year's defense of popular culture, Everything Bad Is Good For You - the author has also chosen his subject for the light it can shine into other corners...
...fair, the public-health authorities had begun works to improve the city's infrastructure. But their refusal to retreat from the miasma theory, and the extra piles of atmospheric data they commissioned to prop it up, cost thousands more lives. Snow's victory over the miasmatists wasn't conceded until years after his death in 1858. Some never relented, such as London's otherwise enlightened Health Board chief, Edwin Chadwick, who went to his grave still propounding that belief in 1890 - seven years after the German scientist Robert Koch definitively identified Vibrio cholerae...
...United States’s continued academic success. In fact, other parts of the department’s report chart out commendable efforts in the pursuit of educational accessibility and availability. It’s unfortunate that these come nestled in amongst the commission’s bureaucratic miasma that reads more like a corporate annual report than a genuine educational strategy...
Baiano is frying potatoes next to an open sewer in a district of São Paulo known as Campo Limpo (beautiful field). His van is plastered with election posters. Three girls brave the miasma of cooking oil and rotting waste to hand him leaflets for a rival. They've been paid to campaign - voting is compulsory [an error occurred while processing this directive] in Brazil so even slums are targeted when polling day approaches. Baiano has taken no money for his electioneering, and explains "this man isn't the best candidate, but I owe him a favor...
...days in the luxury of the Beverly Wilshire, not really minding that we were neglected by our own country. When it came time for our award, Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen tripped and stuttered through the foreign names. As Jackie and Candy announced the winner in another miasma of mispronunciation, Sooni leaned across and said, "India is still...