Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man was a supposed "missing link" between apes and humans, announced in 1912 from fossil fragments found in England. For decades it misled…
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Vitalism
Vitalism was the long held belief that living things contain a special, non physical "vital force" or "life energy" that animates them and that…
The Caloric Theory
The caloric theory was an explanation of heat, widely accepted into the early nineteenth century, which held that heat is an invisible, weightless…
Astrology
Astrology is the belief that the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars influence human affairs and personalities, and that they can be used…
Alchemy
Alchemy was an ancient and medieval practice that sought to transform base metals such as lead into gold, to discover a universal cure for disease,…
Flat Earth
The idea that the Earth is flat is a debunked belief that the planet is a disc or a plane rather than a sphere. It has been contradicted by…
Miasma Theory
Miasma theory was the belief that diseases such as cholera and the plague were caused by "bad air," a poisonous vapor thought to rise from rotting…
Humorism: The Four Humors
Humorism, or humoral theory, was the belief that human health depends on the balance of four bodily fluids, called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow…
Phrenology
Phrenology was a popular nineteenth century practice that claimed a person's character and mental abilities could be read from the shape and bumps of…
Spontaneous Generation
Spontaneous generation was the long held belief that living organisms could arise directly from non living matter. People thought maggots formed from…
Phlogiston Theory
Phlogiston theory was an early explanation of combustion, widely accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It held that all flammable…
The Geocentric Model
The geocentric model was the ancient belief that the Earth sits motionless at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars all…
The Martian Canals
The Martian canals were a network of fine, straight lines that some astronomers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed they…
Bloodletting
Bloodletting was the practice of deliberately draining blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness. For more than two thousand years it was one…
The Luminiferous Aether
The luminiferous aether was a hypothetical substance once believed to fill all of space and to serve as the medium through which light waves…