Mild weather has a long history of bringing us illness
As coronavirus continues its rampant spread, many experts hope the weather may rescue us. Certainly it was the case with another outbreak: swine flu, which faltered during the warmer months and mutated into a pale shadow of its former self.
Humans have long seen the weather as playing a crucial role in our health.
Shakespeare’s plays are littered with reference to tumultuous atmospheric conditions playing internal havoc. “Fair is foul and foul is fair” cried the three witches in Macbeth.
In the 18th century, the Rev Gilbert White wrote of “a miserable pauper” in the village who suffered from leprosy and whose conditions appeared in rhythm with the seasons.
His contemporary, the physician Charles Bisset, divided the medical year into five periods: beginning with the summer solstice and finishing at the vernal equinox. Unseasonal weather, he wrote, close, wet summers or insufficiently cold winters could give rise to all manner of “bilious disease”. Interestingly, coronavirus has blown in on the back of a mild winter and the wettest February on record.
Bisset described treating patients during the unseasonably warm springs of 1756 and 1757 for numerous slow fevers, shivering fits and hysteric affections and madness he believed were linked to the weather. Mostly, he prescribed “moderate blooding; gentle carminative laxatives, and antihysterics”.
The latter would do well among the more far-fetched on social media who claim the virus is in fact escaped from some Far East laboratory.
The 18th century physicians would have approved of yesterday’s frosts for halting the virus’s spread, believing they sealed noxious marsh gas in.
As for the coming days, they would be rather less hopeful: generally more of the wet and windy stuff. In other words, weather to self-isolate to.