Varro Predicted Invisible Disease-Causing Creatures

In 37 BC, Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro warned readers of his agricultural treatise, De re rustica, about living near swamps and marshland. He thought that these places were favorable to the production of “minute creatures which are not visible to the eyes” that floated in the air and entered the body through the mouth and nose, causing serious diseases. Some 1,700 years before scientists first saw microorganisms in the 17th century, Varro described this invisible threat.

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