Horace Vernet: Plague in Barcelona
This painting depicts a yellow fever epidemic. At the time, contagious diseases were becoming a hot topic of study as they had the potential to interfere with European empire-building. French doctors made a careful study in an attempt to determine if the contagionist or the miasmatic school of thought regarding disease origin was correct. Since nobody at the time had any idea that diseases (yellow fever among them) could be transmitted by insects, their study found a lack of evidence for a contagious spread of the disease - a setback in the progress of medical science.
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