While I don't think this lessens my enthusiasm for the subject in any way, it is a handicap. Not only do I not know Latin and other languages that would have allowed me to explore original texts, amateurs are always at greater risk of being taken in by the historical misreading and exaggeration of others and introducing some themselves. I have been able to bring to this subject. If readers get as much pleasure out of this book as I had in writing it, which I truly hope proves to be the case, they will be additionally pleased to learn that the literature covering this subject is vast and mostly accessible. Some suggestions are given in the Further Reading section.
Legend is a wonderfully ambivalent term.
Even real figures of legendary stature rarely escape having some fictitious tale woven into their biography. Both Hippocrates and Pasteur are of legendary stature. Fictitious as they are, however, miasmas dominated the world of epidemics up until the time that microbes came to be accepted as real disease-causing agents. Today some might find miasma-related legends somewhat ludicrous, but their place and importance in history cannot be denied. Hippocrates used the word miasma to express the idea of a contaminated atmosphere that could give rise to epidemics.