| Samuel Johnson remarked back in 1758: “When two Englishmen
meet, their first talk is of the weather.” The comment remains
apposite to this day. Sensitivity to weather extends as far back as civilisation,
if not further. Humanity has always looked to the atmospheric disturbances
of its planet for warnings of calamities to come and assurances of a
brighter future. Unusual astronomical events such as the appearance of
a comet out of the blue, the flight of a meteorite across the heavens,
or a notable constellation in the night sky, have been looked upon as
portents, and the pseudoscience of astrology gave employment to many
wise men and arrant rogues in the households of great princes. In the
course of time, the correlation of human events with atmospheric phenomena
acquired a rather superficial precision suggesting the scientific approach.
During the Crimean War a certain M. de Maout, who was a pharmacist in Saint-Brieuc
in Brittany, kept careful records of his local rainfall and related them
to the days of battles. He discovered that most of the wet days occurred
on dates that clashes took place in the Crimea and concluded that the roar
of cannons and the clashing of swords disturbed the atmosphere sufficiently
to precipitate rainfall as far away as Brittany and elsewhere. De Maout
also thought that the ringing of church bells might have a similar effect,
and ventured that if Napoleon had been aware of this reaction he might
have used it to win the
battle of Waterloo and so change the course of history.
Weather and health
Weather, we must now accept, has an important influence upon the health
of man and his domesticated animals, and this has had, and continues
to have, a
profound influence on human welfare and history. In his classic work ‘Epidemics
of the middle ages,’ Julius Hecker wrote: “That omnipotence
which has called the world with all its living creatures into one
animated being, especially reveals himself in the desolation of great
pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the
sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterranean thunders; the mist
of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction.” According
to Hecker, a violent and extensive catarrhal fever, which the
Italians called influenza, overran France and other parts of Europe in
1510, in the wake of a freezing winter of violent wind storms, accompanied
by earthquakes in northern and central Italy. People began to suffer
from giddiness, headache, shooting muscular pains, delirium and excitement.
After an exceptionally dry summer in 1557, another outbreak occurred,
involving hoarseness, feelings of head and chest oppression, shivering
and violent cough, at first dry but then becoming copiously
productive. Languor, loss of strength and appetite, nausea, abundant
sweating and sometimes diarrhoea followed. In Holland this epidemic was
promptly followed by bubonic plague, from which 5,000 inhabitants of
Delft died.
In 1505, Europe had a wet summer and a severe winter. Comets were seen
and there were eruptions of Vesuvius. These portents were followed by
an outbreak of the “sweating sickness”, a violent inflammatory
fever that peaked after 24 hours and had a mortality rate exceeding 29
per cent. This illness had also occurred in England in 1485 after the
battle of Bosworth Field, during an unusually high humidity, which was
characterised by heavy mists and dark clouds. There was another outbreak
in 1528, affecting England and the Continent, bringing destruction and
death. It followed a year of heavy rain, flooding rivers and rotting
crops. It was noted that suicide in northern Europe, previously rare,
became frequent. There were impenetrable fogs and unusual appearances
of comets over a period of six months. Again in 1551 there was a serious
outbreak of sweating sickness in Shrewsbury, spreading over the country
and killing 960 people in the Severn area. The dogstar
The classical writers who enjoyed a sunnier climate around the Mediterranean,
nevertheless had to contend with many sicknesses, which came with
changes
in the weather. The worst season for them was midsummer, when the dogstar
Sirius was ascending, accompanied by great heat.
Virgil remarked that the dogstar brought thirst and disease to mortals.
It “saddens heaven with its maleficent light”, he wrote.
Horace regarded Sirius as the symbol of physical exhaustion, and Pliny
the Elder commented: “It is indeed beyond doubt that dogs throughout
the whole of that period are especially liable to rabies.” Pliny
goes further and claims “that we learn by the storms that the sun
is completing its orbit; and not only by rainfall or storms but by many
things that happen to our bodies and to the fields. Some men are paralysed
by a star, others suffer periodic disturbances of the stomach, sinews,
head, or mind.”
The moon
Pliny rightly observed that the phases of the moon affect the life
of the sea creatures of the littoral, and the shrew, the mouse and the
ant. “This makes ignorance all the more disgraceful to humans,
especially as they admit that eye diseases in some cattle wax and wane
with the moon,” he wrote. In 1708, the physician Richard Mead
wrote “A discourse concerning the action of the sun and moon
on animal bodies,” in which he quotes the case of “a young
gentle-woman whose beauty depended upon the lunar force, insomuch that
at full moon she was plump and very handsome, but in the decrease of
the planet so wan and ill-favoured that she was ashamed to go abroad
till the return of the new moon”.
Since Roman times the moon had evil repute as a cause of eye disorders.
In 1822 Thomas De Quincey recorded that a traveller from Upper Egypt
had assured him that by sleeping a few hours under the light of a full
moon, which is as much shunned in some parts of the East as sleeping
on the wet ground with us, or standing bareheaded under the noonday sun
in Bengal, he had sorely damaged his vision. On the other hand, David
Livingstone informed a correspondent: “I have myself slept for
weeks on the bare ground and often looked up to the beautifully clear
orb until I have fallen asleep. Yet I have felt nothing in consequence,
nor have I heard the natives ascribe anything baneful to her rays.”
 However, there was an old Devonshire belief that the onset of measles
was always during a waxing moon, never a waning one, and in Sussex exposure
to a May moon was
reckoned to cure scrofulous complaints. Even today we have not completely
divested ourselves of belief in the malign influence of the moon and
the term lunacy remains in our vocabulary. The wind
When we consider the effects of winds and air turbulence in general
on the state of our health and the progress of diseases we find no shortage
of data. The Romans took account of winds not only because of their varied
effects upon agriculture and crops, but also because they recognised
their
influence over diseases of cattle and of humans. The elder Pliny held
that of the four major winds recognised, “the healthiest of all
is the north wind; the south is harmful, and most of all when dry, perhaps
because when it is damp it is colder; living creatures are thought to
be less hungry while it is blowing”.
Aubert de la Rue wrote ‘L’homme et le vent’, a book
examining, extensively, the many aspects of winds upon human affairs.
He notes that wind causes fatigue, abrupt changes in air temperature
and humidity, and carries dust particles and micro-organisms up into
the atmosphere and distributes them over wide areas of land and sea.
The results were described by Hippocrates in the 4th century BC, who
noted that “in towns frequently exposed to winds such as those
blowing from the east and west, and sheltered from the north winds, the
slightest circumstance may change sores into ulcers. The inhabitants
of such places lack force and vigour; the women are sickly and voluntarily
barren; the children are attacked by convulsions; men are subject to
dysentery and long winter fevers.”
Certain of the distinctive winds affecting the Mediterranean region have
become proverbial on account of their effects upon body and mind. The
mistral, which
ravages Provence from the north to the north west, is dry, cold and powerful.
It is responsible for the proverb that in Avignon it is unpleasant when
the wind blows, and unhealthy when it does not. The mistral blows mainly
in spring and autumn, when pressure is high in the north and west of
France and low over the Mediterranean between Spain and Italy. Since
it is directed by the mountains into the Rhône valley it develops
considerable force there, between Valence and Arles, and may be felt
as far away as Nice. Lasting for up to a week, the mistral inevitably
has a disastrous effect on crops, and dries the soil of Provence, where
rains are irregular. Its effect on the human spirit is additional to
its physical onslaught. Bora, fohn and sirocco winds
In narrow gorges wind speed may exceed 90mph. Strabo, at the end of
the 1st century BC, writes of the wind called melamboreas “which
displaces rocks, hurls men from their chariots, crushes their limbs,
and strips them of their clothes and arms”. It is a cold wind,
which can lower air temperature by 10C in 24 hours.
The bora is the prevailing wind of the Adriatic, blowing from the north
east over Italy when pressure over the Balkans is high. It is a descending
cold dry current affecting mainly the coastal region from Trieste to
Ragusa and is disastrous for crops. Like the mistral, it descends through
mountain
passes with great ferocity, and has been known to derail trains. Once
out to sea it loses much of its force.
The fohn, by contrast, is a hot wind from the south, affecting the northern
valleys of the Alps, particularly in autumn and winter. It can electrify
the hair of humans exposed to it, and is responsible for fires in wooden
structures. Its effect on the nervous system is to make people ill at
ease and feverish. When it occurs in spring it brings floods as mountain
avalanches occur, but there is some benefit in ridding the land of snow
earlier than would otherwise happen. Another hot and dust-laden wind
blowing from the Sahara to the Mediterranean shores is the sirocco, known
for its enervating effect on men and animals. There is also a local wind
affecting the Lyons region which raises air temperature and reduces humidity.
People exposed to it complain of malaise, headache, rheumatic pains,
a sense of stifling, and high irritability. This wind is reported to
increase asthmatic attacks, particularly in children. In Morocco the
sirocco upsets fluid balance unless extra liquid is taken to counteract
its effect, and children may suffer heat stroke. There are conflicting
reports of its effect upon the mind, but it has been held responsible
for outbreaks of violence and suicide among garrisons of the French Foreign
Legion in North Africa. East winds
East winds in our own islands have always been suspected as ill-omened.
The royal house of Stuart was at one time held to be particularly threatened
by them since there was an east wind blowing in London on the day when
Charles I was beheaded, and also later when James II was deposed. Voltaire
tells us that an English physician friend had assured him that in London
the easterly wind was responsible for a wave of suicides during November
and March.
In Edinburgh east winds were notorious for their lethal effects on
the body and their depressive effects on the spirit. Robert Louis Stevenson,
who spent his childhood under their influence, said that his native
climate was “one of the vilest climates under heaven”. He
remarked that Edinburgh was “liable to be beaten upon by all the
winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs
out of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward
from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter,
shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory
in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor among bleak
winds and plunging rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their
fate.” Curiously enough, Stevenson took some interest in meteorological
phenomena, and while still living in Edinburgh wrote a paper “On
the thermal effect of forests” which he read before the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. And he took advantage of a dismally wet and cold season
to write his ‘Treasure island’ in 1883. Although he shared
the depression as well as the physical effect of atrocious weather, he
never heard of that strange phenomenon that today we call seasonal affective
disorder. Nor did he have the opportunity of hearing of the disastrous
experiences of Robert Scott in 1912 who, with his
companions retreating from the South Pole, when only a few miles from
their base in the face of a prolonged blizzard, lost the capacity for
clear thought and effort . Weather and morbidity
Over the past few decades efforts have been made to assess with precision
the effects of local weather conditions on morbidity. Ellsworth Huntington
of Yale published,
in 1915, an important work examining
the relationship between civilisation and
climate. He concluded that extreme dryness anywhere in the world is a
threat to health, and that high humidity and variability of weather play
a role in determining health and mortality from day to day and year to
year. In Boston he detected a fall in the death rate when temperature
fell, and vice versa. When research was done on the
deadly influenza epidemics after 1918, starkly different death rates
from pneumonia occurred in different cities of the United States, with
marked effects being attributable to local temperature and humidity
during the preceding month. Warmth and wetness raised mortality.
Since Huntington’s time, many factors have been confirmed as influencing
the health of humans and animals. Highly changeable weather, particularly
in winter, appears to be both physically and mentally invigorating. In
regions where humans are hard driven of necessity, their growth and development
are more rapid and resistance to infection is higher. But in tropical
lowlands infections are more common and lack of energy and drive result
in neglect of personal and public hygiene. Winter cold and wind storms
in northern countries cause a sharp rise in respiratory infections, with
bodily exhaustion. In the same regions summer heat and lack of storms
induce fatigue. In countries in the southern hemisphere, such as Australia
and Argentina, weather tends to be more equable and the winter increase
of infections less marked. Migration from a relaxing weather pattern
into one with more storms tends to increase mortality, since winter storms
threw an increased burden on the cardiovascular system, with more heart
failure, coronary occlusion and cerebrovascular accidents.
The highest incidence of diabetes mellitus is seen in regions where climate
is most stimulating, and the metabolic diseases, particularly diabetes
and toxic goitre, show more complications in spring and winter. A marked
fall in atmospheric pressure causes tissue swelling which facilitates
the entry of micro-organisms lurking in the vicinity. The incidence of
acute appendicitis during heat waves has been shown to increase if a
rise in air temperature coincides with a fall in barometric pressure.
 Body
chilling from any cause may precipitate respiratory and rheumatic attacks
in susceptible people. Furthermore, the existence of “thunderstorm
asthma” has been supported by research, following sporadic reports
of asthma epidemics after thunderstorms. For example, research published
in the BMJ (1996;312:601–4) studied records in 12 accident and
emergency departments in London after a thunderstorm and found almost
10 times the expected number of
cases of asthma. This has been linked with the sudden rise in aeroallergens
that can accompany thunderstorms. The researchers suggested that gusting
winds resuspend residual pollen and that allergens, such as fungal spores,
are carried up by the rapid uplifts of air associated with convective
storms and before being redeposited by rain. Mental health
The most fascinating aspect of the relationship between weather and
health is that of mental health. Mental acuity and level of performance
of
tasks commonly fall when atmospheric pressure is rapidly declining.
Mental instability is increased when
frequent and abrupt storms are passing.
Suicide is less frequent when the barometer is high or mounting than
when it is falling, but only when the change is abrupt or marked. Yet
it is believed that as a centre of low pressure approaches there may
be a feeling of futility, and an inability to accomplish the usual
intellectual tasks without extra effort. Children may show increased
irritability,
restlessness and petulance. Adults may become more quarrelsome and
pessimistic. As the centre of low pressure retreats exhilaration
follows. Artists
and musicians discover new creativity, and everyone grows a little
easier to live with.
Today there are so many devices for
creating a microclimate in the home, the workplace and the car that
we are in danger of eliminating many of the stresses and
challenges that the weather presents to us. And if we develop too great
an independence from our atmosphere we may find that we have destroyed
much of the interest in living, which spurs us on to creative efforts. |
