Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion

4 Badger-Human Conflict: An Overlooked Historical Context for Bovine TB Debates in the UK

“…Fissell also argued that early modern 'vermin' were not associated with dirt, disease and disgust as they are today, and that these links later developed alongside the adoption of germ theory during the nineteenth century (Douglas 1966). Lucinda Cole (2014) draws upon sixteenth-and seventeenth-century accounts of the plague to instead argue that vermin were associated with disease at this time, but via an intertwined complex of natural and supernatural causes including miasma (bad air) and witchcraft.…”