Zymotic disease

As originally employed by William Farr, of the British Registrar-General's department, the term included the diseases which were "epidemic, endemic and contagious," and were regarded as owing their origin to the presence of a morbific principle in the system, acting in a manner analogous to, although not identical with, the process of fermentation.

[2]In the late 19th century, Antoine Béchamp proposed that tiny organisms he termed microzymas, and not cells, are the fundamental building block of life.

[5] Robert Newstead (1859–1947) used this term in a 1908 publication in the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, to describe the contribution of house flies (Musca domestica) towards the spread of infectious diseases.

However, by the early 1900s, bacteriology "displaced the old fermentation theory",[2] and so the term became obsolete.

In her Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East, Florence Nightingale depicts The blue wedges measured from the centre of the circle represent area for area the deaths from Preventible or Mitigable Zymotic diseases; the red wedges measured from the centre the deaths from wounds, & the black wedges measured from the centre the deaths from all other causes.