Miasmatist

Florence Nightingale was a miasmatist, believing that diseases spread by emanations given off by the environment (essentially bad air) and particularly by poor hygiene.

This was an especially important function since the majority of Victorian health professions were miasmatists, meaning they believed diseases could be spread through "bad air." Burial in quicklime was never standard practice despite the fact that overcrowded graveyards often presented a threat to public health.

The miasmatists stab a microscope into a living louse to

In 1894, the battle was between the new "germ theory" scientists such as Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and their followers, and the miasmatists, those who held that disease was caused by bad air, or bad water, or bad soil.

"Historians have tended to divide disease theorists into rival camps: miasmatists versus contagionists.