Historian Melanie Kiechle discusses how the fear of “bad air” guided the daily decisions and medical practices of Civil War soldiers and physicians.
Civil War Breakthroughs is a podcast that explores how the inventions, ideas, and innovations of the Civil War era defined a new kind of conflict. In our second season, The Medical Renaissance, we'll explore how modern medicine took root during the Civil War.
On this episode, we're joined by Melanie Kiechle, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech and author of Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (2019). She talks about how the fear of “bad air” guided the daily decisions and medical practices of Civil War soldiers and physicians.