Bless You!

I was reading about the Monist philosopher Anaximenes. A Monist believes that the basic "stuff" of reality is one thing and one thing only. Air, water, fire, and so on (though Pythagoras thought it was just numbers).
Anaximenes thought it was air. He theorized that one's breath is linked to your soul.
This lead me to read about when people sneezed. Apparently people used to think you could sneeze your soul out. Yep- you sneeze and your soul comes flying out of you. This is why people would say, "Bless you" or some such. (This also makes my mom wonder if mucus was thought to be part of your soul. Eww!)
I've read about this before, but today it stuck me as more comical than usual. And then I realized that if I were with someone who believed this, I'd be considered awfully cruel. And people would probably think that I didn't care about my soul!
But I have to wonder something else: What did they think if they had a cold? Or if their allergies were acting up? Or if they sniffed something and it made them sneeze? Did they think to relate the sneeze to being ill or to scents? Or did they think that they were being punished by potentially losing their soul?
I also wonder if anyone ever got really sick. Maybe they spiked a really high fever, and without modern medicine it caused mental damage. Lets say they had sneezed a few times during this illness. Would people think their mental damage was from being sick, or would they say "Oh! Poor Billy here sneezed and lost his soul. Now something is wrong with him!"

It's things like these I always wonder about...