Avast Swabbing! The Medical Campaign to Reform Swabbing the Decks in the U.S. Navy

Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. Navy medical men, believing that airborne filth—miasmata—caused many of the diseases afflicting sailors and that humid air carries more filth than dry, sought to curtail the cleaning of the decks of warships with wet swabs. They met resistance to this reform from line officers who, from a variety of motives, were committed to keeping their ships clean. The medical reform movement attained its greatest intensity in the 1870s but quickly dissipated at the end of the century when steel hulls replaced wooden ones and the germ theory of disease replaced the theory of miasmata