The rabbi did inspections and acted as the public health officer. The old stones are replaced with new, the house is replastered and then monitored to see whether the trouble recurs. Ergotamine is now sometimes prescribed for migraine headaches, because it causes overdilated arteries in the brain to contract, thus relieving the pain. There are other ways in which molds have been useful to people, but none of them relate to preservation of collections, so we will move on. The Organism Fungus is the umbrella term for mold, mildew, mushrooms, yeasts, and puffballs.
Fungi have a kingdom all to themselves, like plants and animals.
What they all have in common, for starters, is that all their cells have one or more nuclei, and none of them have chlorophyll, so they can't make their own carbohydrates. Mildew is a popular term for visible mold in the home, but mycologists use it only for the molds that infect plants, like downy mildew. The term mold applies to the microscopic members of this kingdom whose lifestyle involves putting out root-like rhizomes, releasing spores, and living in colonies. Although they are handicapped by their lack of chlorophyll and their inability to move around, they have compensated in a number of ways by their metabolic and reproductive versatility. There is some evidence that fungi are responsible for foxing on the paper of old books, despite the fact that the brown spots don't look like mold colonies.