You are because in 1847, 49 years after Terrare’s death in 1798, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered washing your hands before operations drastically reduced mo

You are because in 1847, 49 years after Terrare’s death in 1798, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered washing your hands before operations drastically reduced morality would be ignored and ridiculed by his peers for years until he suffered a mental breakdown and was thrown into an insane asylum where he was beaten and died. Around this same time people still believed that disease was caused by miasma. That is, disease was carried by smell alone. This is why plague doctors in centuries prior had those masks with beaks filled with spices and aromatics; cannot smell the disease? You cannot contract it. Make no mistake though, that was still the common belief until Dr. Jon Snow proved cholera was caused by polluted water and not miasma. This is a time where if you couldn’t sense something yourself then it wasn’t considered real; its no wonder that mental illness wasn’t (and still isn’t) really taken seriously either in some degree or at all.