A person, especially a historical physician or scientist, who believed that diseases spread through direct contact or transmission of contagious matter.
From 'contagion' plus '-ist' (denoting a believer in or practitioner of something). This term is historically important for describing 18th-19th century medical theorists who opposed the miasma theory.
Contagionists were the 'germ theory' people of the 1600s-1800s—they argued with miasma-believers in a controversy that kept medicine confused for centuries until microscopes finally let us see bacteria.
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