Plant effluvia. Changing notions of the effects of plant exhalations on human health in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Abstract

Abstract Explaining the nature of plants through physiological study was not fully accepted in England until the mid eighteenth century. Until its appearance, living plants could not be understood beyond simple mechanistic or taxonomic theories, which did nothing to combat popular and unfounded reports of the strange effects of plant effluvia on the human constitution. 1