Abstract
By the early 1800s, the large volume of publications on the capacity of external factors to shape human physiology testified to a widespread consensus on the connection between an individual’s state of health and the state of the air they breathed. Assumptions about the correlation between health and atmospheric events characterized the eighteenth-century neo-Hippocratic approach, which played a major role in the epidemiological analyses undertaken by medical practitioners and scholars such as James Jurin, John Huxham, and Thomas Short.2 Charting the pathologies of seasonal change, their results set out the correlations between illness and weather.3These correlations indicated that certain diseases corresponded to atmospheric conditions, and that atmospheric conditions developed over the seasons. This link was therapeutically useful—it enabled the doctor to predict the timing, nature, and likely prognosis of the course of a disease. Physicians also knew that the spread of disease depended on fluctuations in the properties of soil, water, and air. They also argued that epidemics arose in places infested by malodorous mists—miasmas—which tended to occur during sultry weather and in the vicinity of decaying organic matter.4
Ought the alarming Number of Suicides in this Country to be attributed to the Progress of Infidelity, Disappointment in the tender Passion, or any Peculiarity in our Soil and Climate?
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Notes
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© 2010 Vladimir Janković
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Janković, V. (2010). Exposed and Vulnerable. In: Confronting the Climate. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113466_2
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