According to Byler, he also cited Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” with its depictions of fog, as a major influence: A miasmatic fog looms in “The Backstreets,” and the frosty treatment of the protagonist by Han Chinese added to the inhospitable surroundings in the novel.

A Philadelphia writer had noted the city’s “miasmatic troubles” caused by “disgusting accumulations” along the banks of the Potomac.

But the microscope has discovered in the miasmatic air a multitude of living things.

Up until that point, diseases like cholera had been thought of in miasmatic terms - that they travelled in bad air - and tackled with what Prof Chakrabarti called "broad spectrum treatments".

One pre-print research paper with flashy graphics, for instance, seemed to show joggers and cyclists barreling down streets in a vast miasmatic breath cloud.