Climate, Environment, and Medicine in Georgian England and the Antipodes

Abstract

This paper examines the place of environment, climate, and the aerospace within the eighteenth-century understanding of the causation of disease. The centrality of atmospheric air in the eighteenth-century's theory of contagion was relocated en bloc from Hippocratic-Galenic postulates to become foremost in the six non-naturals for the preservation of health, with Nature considered preeminent above the cure-care art of medicine, the vis medicatrix naturae. Studies of meteorological phenomena attempted to corroborate the catenation of environmental-miasmatic causations and human disease, the nexus between meteorological data and epidemiology. European settlers in tropical climates first required seasoning, usually with a fever, to reliably adjust to the climate. Medical monitoring of isolated white cohorts in the Antipodean Temperate Zone unfortunately contributed no further knowledge to eighteenth-century disease theory.