Although understood during previous centuries through popular and folk traditions that allocated the plagues of the Early Modern Era to possible pestilence from vapors, the central English academic treatment of what came to be called miasma theory appeared within Robert Boyle’s Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air (1674).1 Although centrally about overturning the idea that air was benign within chemical reactions, Boyle’s Royal Society text described how objects that decayed into “effluvium” caused diseases that penetrated the defenses of the human body through the nasal passages.