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Meteorology, Climate, and Health in the United Stateslocked

Meteorology, Climate, and Health in the United Stateslocked

  • Elaine LaFayElaine LaFayRutgers University

Summary

Unraveling the connections between meteorology, climate, and health—all broadly defined—is an endeavor that cuts across an astonishing array of times, places, and peoples. How societies pursue and interpret these connections is deeply tied to sociocultural, environmental, and political context. In the United States, meteorological beliefs rested on shared assumptions rooted in ancient traditions that linked prevailing environmental and climatic conditions with human health. By the 17th century, the steadfast collection of meteorological phenomena in weather journals was tethered to medical knowledge as well as the pursuit of agricultural, business, and shipping ventures. Environmental conditions were routinely theorized as causes for epidemics and individual sickness (or cure). As meteorology changed from a practice of data collection to a science over the 18th and 19th centuries, its medical arm branched into the interlocking fields of medical meteorology, medical climatology, and medical topography. However, even with the rise of new meteorological technologies and methods, older ways of knowing the weather persisted alongside formal medical theories of health and place, and tacit, embodied knowledge was never fully supplanted by instrumental data collection. The science of meteorology also grew into being as a tool of empire. Imperial states established networks of meteorological stations to collect weather data to further colonial ambitions and foster politically charged geographic imaginaries of colonized places and peoples. But theorizing the relationship between climate and health was not restricted to white men of science. Black intellectuals and subaltern peoples held radically different cosmologies of climate and challenged prevailing essentialist theories of climate and health throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 20th century, scientists situated changing climates as a key dimension for disease patterns and demographic transition more broadly. As historians make use of the increasingly sophisticated methods of historical climatology, past climate reconstruction has sparked new questions on how environmental conditions have both enabled and constrained human action during climate—and political, infrastructural—disasters. New interdisciplinary approaches to the climate crisis have further offered ways to bridge the disconnect between climate science and medical practice that emerged during the 20th century.

Subjects

  • Past Climates
  • History of Climate Science
  • Climate Impact: Human Health

Introduction

The health effects of climate have been an avatar for key social issues including geopolitical alignment, civil rights, capitalist transformations, and a site of both oppression and resistance in imperial regimes. This article surveys a range of interpretations about the connections between meteorology, climate, and health in the United States. Much of this knowledge influenced and was influenced by knowledge coming out of Europe and its colonial territories, reinforcing the intellectual tethers cutting across Euro-colonial spaces. For much of this history, people operated under the assumption that human bodies were porous to prevailing environmental conditions, and that climatic and weather-related phenomena were core components of human health.

Several interrelated characteristics have emerged as critical themes among scholars interested in the intersections of meteorology, climate, and health. First is the importance of changing knowledge of climate and health over time. The meanings of “climate” and “health” are not transhistorical constants but are themselves changing ideas that are historically contingent on time and place. Second are the ways in which the scientific infrastructure of meteorology, climate science, and medicine have shaped knowledge production. Changing techniques and technologies of weather observation both influenced and were influenced by new ways of thinking about health. Third are the social implications of such knowledge. Theories of climate and health had an outsized role in the imperial histories of the United States and Europe and were sites of both oppression and resistance in colonial territories and slave societies. By paying attention to the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced along prevailing power structures, one can also see how social and cultural beliefs have similarly underpinned the application of that knowledge.

Scholars have approached the history of meteorology, climate, and health along two methodological axes. The first, informed by the history of science and medicine, cultural history, and environmental history, queries how people understood the world around them in their own terms. In the second, historians have used 21st-century scientific knowledge to ask how climatic conditions, including climatic variations and weather-related extremes or disasters, have constrained or enabled human action. Scholars working with this latter method, known as historical climatology, are self-consciously interdisciplinary, drawing from climate science to interrogate the vulnerabilities of societies to weather- and climate-related phenomena, as well as from history, to explore past discourses and social representations of climate. Both frameworks take seriously the notion that knowledge of and from the past deserves serious consideration, showing how situating climatic and medical knowledge in historical context can inform current approaches to climate science. After reviewing major themes and trends in the field in the early 21st century, this article provides a historical overview of how past societies imagined the relationships between meteorology, climate, and health, and how imperial states and their peoples leveraged those understandings to shape their societies.

Part I: Current State of the Field

Recent histories of meteorology, health, and climate have embraced complexity and hybrid causal forces, emphasizing the fundamental interconnectedness of human activity, human health, and global Earth systems. The climate crisis is already causing sickness and disability. COVID-19 is only the latest in an uptick of vector-borne pathogens, and experts suggest that the trend of increasing zoonotic diseases will continue. Consequently, recent scholarship has pivoted to more robust considerations of the health implications of the climate crisis, breathing new life into historical questions of health, climate, and embodiment. Historians have further shown that modern debates around which landscapes have value, which are disposable, and to whom, have roots in earlier colonial ideologies and land use practices. Partly as a response to the myriad ways in which the climate crisis is already affecting human health, scholars have broadened their approaches to the interlocking web of climate issues around health to include disability and debilitation, introducing striking new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Centuries of environmental racism have overwhelmingly placed Black and Indigenous peoples in closer proximity to the catastrophic health effects of climate change and environmental harm. During the Cold War, the U.S. government designated certain areas “Sacrifice Zones,” approving the radioactive contamination of certain places through nuclear testing. Later, journalists and scholars broadened the term to include any areas that are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals because corporations and governments deem their occupants, predominantly low-income and people of color, and ecosystems disposable. Rob Nixon (2011) coined the phrase “slow violence” to capture the slow-moving rate at which disaster unfolds, toxins building in bodies as in atmospheres, polluting lands and lungs, until, in some cases, entire families perish from cancer within only a few short years of each other.

Early 21st-century work on the chemical foundations of environmental harm has further emphasized the ways in which changing climates and increasing environmental toxicity are co-constitutive. Nancy Langston (2010) has shown how hormone disrupters like diethylstilbestrol that were linked to cancer and prescribed to millions of women for miscarriage and menopause also proliferated throughout the mid-20th-century cattle and chicken industries. Work by Michelle Murphy (2006), Max Liboiron (2021), and their collaborators have similarly shown how the structural violence of the climate crisis informs the proliferation of environmental hazard in the United States and Canada. Working out of Indigenous-led environmental justice labs like the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), Murphy, Liboiron, and others have argued that the chemical worlds that enabled the proliferation of plastics and industrial toxins are premised on colonial ideas of property and land. These scholars argue that both environmental violence and the climate crisis stem from a colonial regard for land as an inert, static set of resources that humans should mine for profit, a perspective that is integral to colonialism and which disrupts preexisting relations between peoples, lands, and more-than-human realms (Liboiron, 2021). Springing out of this research is the Endocrine Disruptors Action Group, working within and alongside CLEAR, in which a collaborative of scholar-activists has argued that the widespread presence of endocrine disruptors and other toxics is not only an expression of colonial violence but is legalized under relaxed Canadian and U.S. environmental laws.

The effects of the climate crisis on health cannot be disentangled from the industrial landscape that helped produce it. To this end, a central question animating 21st-century scholarship is how contemporary state-sanctioned environmental violence reflects layered histories of slavery, dispossession, and carceral labor. Residents of “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have rates of cancer more than two times the national average (Kang, 2021). Petrochemical refineries occupied the very land tracts that sugar plantations once held. It is a vivid representation of the long histories of environmental racism, tethering climatic disaster, industrial pollution, and disease to state policy. Neighboring refineries were built in predominantly Black communities, many in towns founded by freedpeople after the Civil War, and in some cases the refineries lie on top of historic Black cemeteries (McDowell, 2019). Similarly, roughly 40% of Canada’s booming petrochemical industry is concentrated within “Chemical Valley,” a 15-mile range in southeastern Ontario that borders the Aamjiwnaang First Nation reserve. The area also contains high concentrations of toxic pollutants associated with reproductive disorders, asthma, and cancers in humans. Owen Temby (2020) has shown how economic elites concealed knowledge about air pollution in the 1970s, suppressing dissent and easing regulations to lay the groundwork for decades of contaminated air.

This growing body of literature has shown how Indigenous, rural, and island communities are disproportionately affected by climate change and some of the earliest to feel adverse health effects. At the same time, and relatedly, policymakers and environmental activists have begun to turn toward Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) for Indigenous frameworks to inform pathways for resilience, adaptability, and sustainable resource management. But scholars and activists have critiqued this approach for its dismissal of political claims of tribal sovereignty like the Land Back campaign, severing Indigenous environmental knowledge from its political link to self-determination (Hernandez, 2022; Pieratos et al., 2021). These scholars have taken pains to situate such knowledge practices as beyond the scope of colonial thought, and decidedly not a kind of environmental thinking that can be seamlessly incorporated into neoliberal and colonial frames in moments of crisis. Challenging the reflexive positioning of Indigenous cosmologies and ways of knowing against Euro-colonial frames, Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe sociologist Vanessa Watts has argued that ontologies like “Place-Thought” can be understood only on their own terms (Watts, 2013). Place-Thought is a complex and worldmaking set of practices that are locally contingent; broadly, it refers to the myriad relationships between and among Indigenous peoples and more-than-human beings that includes ceremonies, treaty-making, and past agreements with the spirit world, sky world, and animal world. Spearheaded by Indigenous scholars, recent work on Indigenous cosmologies has sought to contextualize past and present ways of knowing, situating environmental knowledge along relational ethics of care, and working to restore what dispossession and violence have sought to erase (Cruikshank, 2005; Watts, 2013).

All too often, scholars assume that “health” is a concern of the able-bodied, erasing the presence of people with disabilities from the historical reckoning of climate and health. Sunaura Taylor (2021) has called the 21st century an “Age of Disability,” arguing that the climate crisis is a “mass disabling event.” More studies of climate and health are needed that take disability as a critical category of analysis, rupturing the binary of “health” and “disease” to include forms of impairment not easily bound by diagnostic frames. Attention to disability also invites attention to the ways in which people with disabilities are more vulnerable to harm during weather-related disasters, as in Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Hurricane Sandy (2012) when some wheelchair users were stranded without accessible shelters and with no plan for evacuation. By situating discriminatory systems and environmental violence in historical context, one might begin the twin projects of what Taylor calls “the environmentalism of the injured,” or “the insistence on fighting for a world in which the injured can flourish, while also struggling against those systems and institutions responsible for and benefiting from the injury” (Taylor, 2021). Julia Watts Belser (2020) calls this dual approach the “disability embrace,” by which scholars can explore disability as a site of social violence and environmental harm and simultaneously regard disability as a “vibrant and meaningful part of social and political identity.”

Further attention at the intersection of disability studies and the history of climate and health can also illuminate critical avenues of political resistance and possibilities for adaptation to changing climates. George Adamson et al. (2018) have critiqued histories of climate for its thin incorporation of climate adaptation research: to this end, attention to disability as a historical category of analysis can broaden the scope of what counts as adaptation to baneful environments. Belser’s digital project, Disability & Climate Change, takes adaptation to weather-related disasters like pandemics and hurricanes as a central analytic, gathering interviews with an array of activists and writers working in both environmental justice and disability justice frameworks. This project, though still in its nascent stages, is exemplary of the ways in which attention to this intersection can offer provocative avenues for exploring the political stakes of environmental hazard.

Separately, histories of healthcare and histories of meteorology and climate science have excelled in the study of institutional structure, but little has been done to assess how they overlap or diverge. The convoluted, inequitable healthcare system in the United States has created conditions ripe for loss of life due to rising sea levels, temperature extremes, and diseases like COVID-19. Scholars have studied the debilitating oppression from the medico-industrial complex, wearing down populations to a state of permanent disability (Puar, 2017). The study of how climatic context, and heightened social crises, have clashed with state bureaucracy, both at the level of healthcare and conservation, is an area ripe for further exploration.

Finally, as the tools of historical climatology have sharpened over the last several decades, scholars have used proxy data to reconstruct past climates and understand how societies responded to change, whether sudden or long-term (DeGroot et al., 2021). Many of these scholars have mapped the ways past climate changes or climatic phenomena have triggered epidemics, famine, hurricanes, droughts—all disasters with staggering effects on human health. There is a large literature that interprets climate as a deterministic, driving force of human health, but most 21st-century scholars reject this approach for its collapse of context and agency. Ever wary of climatic determinism, historical climatologists stress that climate is cultural as well as atmospheric, arguing that climatic circumstance can be thought to expand or constrict human action, but not determine it. These scholars frame their inquiries according to how changing climates have shaped the conditions for human decision-making, especially during eras of profound climatic and social upheaval such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly.

Modern climate science remains a dynamic and interdisciplinary field, drawing insights and frameworks from a startling array of disciplines. Those include, but are not limited to, oceanography, glaciology, physics, hydrology, biology, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and, increasingly, fields in the humanities (Adamson et al., 2018). Studies of the health effects of climate and climate change have often proceeded via proxies, with “climate” serving as an intellectual anchor for local disasters like heat waves, drought, and agricultural stress. Epidemiologists and public health experts who study climate and health today do so as a matter of specialization in a sub-field, pursuing questions such as the medical effects of extreme heat, drought, and air pollution (Ebi, 2022; Limaye, 2023; Romanello et al., 2022). Psychiatrists and mental health professionals have also begun to study the psychological consequences of the climate crisis, including profound grief and depression over loss of land, cultural pathways, and ways of life. Historians of climate and health are uniquely positioned not only to shed light on how knowledge around weather and health have changed over time, but also to examine how the production of that knowledge is historically situated. In “observing the observers,” as Adamson puts it, historians of science can situate contemporary knowledge of weather and health in broader context, in both the past and the present (Adamson et al., 2018).

Part II: Historical Overview

Climatic and Medical Thought (1600–1850)

“Climate” and “health” are not transhistorical constants, but rather complex frameworks that are socially and politically contingent. The belief that climate, defined broadly, affects human health has a long history. In the Euro-colonial world, this conviction has roots in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient texts loosely attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates (4th century bce), which consolidated several strands of thought that held environmental conditions as causal influences on human health. A fixture in formal medical education since the 2nd century ce, Enlightenment physicians brought renewed interest to the Hippocratic Corpus by blending it with more recent medieval and early modern cosmologies. Under this reimagined model, the pursuit of health became even more tightly intertwined with geographic and meteorological observations.

Early modern medicine taught that human beings and their native physical environment optimally existed in ecological harmony. Health was above all a state of balance, and any deviation from that balance (chiefly too much or too little of one of the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) resulted in sickness. A person’s constitution, or their essential bodily makeup, evolved in or out of alignment with their surroundings. In the early modern era, “climate” was a generalized reference. Derivative of the Greek word klima, meaning “inclination,” climate was a stand-in for interconnected environmental facets including, but not limited to, prevailing winds, water, and soil in a place. The study of climate, weather, and health was central to the intellectual pursuit of natural history, which over the 17th century increasingly became a project of the monarchical state, with implications for political power more broadly. Natural philosopher Francis Bacon, for example, argued forcefully for the pursuit of empiricism, manifest through the “conquest of the works of nature,” as not only the superior means of knowing the world, but as a way of opening secret sources of knowledge on which rulers could depend (Merchant, 1980). Through rigorous observation and experimentation, Bacon held, men of science could reveal universal laws of nature and wield those laws in pursuit of power—and profit.

Before meteorology was a formal discipline, it was a practice rooted in observation of the natural world. Enlightenment-era Euro-colonial observers in Europe and the Americas doggedly kept weather journals, especially as the practice became associated with gentlemanly leisure. Weather journals remain an important archive for past weather phenomena, but they also contain important cultural reflections on the meaning observers ascribed to the weather. In addition to keen observations of temperatures, clouds, and winds laid out in charts and tables, weather observers often offered their own musings alongside that revealed a sublime rapture with the natural world (Golinski, 2007). As instruments like barometers, thermometers, and anemometers became more accessible to bourgeois homes, these weather journals became repositories for data on atmospheric phenomena over time. This was a deeply embodied practice, even with the rise of new weather instruments. In the 18th century, instrument-makers and users alike regarded meteorological instruments as extensions of, not replacements for, the human senses in gauging the physiological effects of the weather (Golinski, 2007).

Knowing the atmosphere was inextricable from knowing disease patterns. During epidemics, observers kept a sharp eye on the weather, ascribing an outbreak’s progression and virulence at least in part to prevailing atmospheric conditions. Regular measurements of meteorological phenomena became a matter not only of personal routine but also of public interest. Beginning in 1751, for example, the London periodical The Gentleman’s Magazine began featuring monthly local weather summaries, including temperature, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, and accounts of prevailing diseases (Golinski, 2007). Many of the earliest chroniclers of weather were physicians; French physician Jean-François Gaultier was the first colonist to regularly produce weather data in Quebec beginning in 1742. Knowing that disease could arise from bad air (mal-aria in Latin), physicians studied climates according to the prevalence of certain diseases, asking why certain places fostered some diseases over others.

It is important to distinguish here between climatology, the study of climate that later became climate science, and meteorology, the study of weather and especially weather prediction. While the methods and institutional structure of the two overlap, the temporal frameworks diverge: climatology and climate science are concerned with general weather patterns and averages over time to inform questions regarding human adaptation in the long term, whereas meteorology is concerned with comparatively immediate queries around atmospheric processes like storm forecasting. The formal practice of meteorology and climatology became institutionalized along structures of colonial governance, linking the endeavor to understand local climates to European expansionism. Historian Jan Golinski (2007) has shown that in the 18th century, discourses on climate became entangled with discourses on “civilization,” as British men of science chronicled the civilizing influence of climates that were conveniently like the one above their own heads. Colonists became convinced that foreign climates could be brought to heel with the influence of deforestation, agriculture, and the introduction of European settlers (Mulry, 2021). Efforts at taming unruly landscapes went together with efforts to tame unruly peoples.

The establishment of colonial observatories provided the global network by which individuated points of data, many of which directly concerned the effects of climate on health, could be collated and analyzed in the metropole. Beginning in the 16th century, Jesuit missionaries built a global web of observatories that were sites of astronomical, seismological, and meteorological data production as well as a means of spreading their faith (Udías, 2015). The British Empire also established observatories across the world, including in Canada, South Africa, India, and Australia, and the men of science who staffed these sites saw themselves as aiding in the colonial enterprise of territorial control and expansion. They produced data on subjects including astronomy, cartography, meteorology, and statistics, and, in a typical example from the Toronto Observatory, the “particularities of climate bearing on the health and industrial occupations of man” (Mahony & Randalls, 2020, p. 29). But while imperial officers were itinerant, often moving swiftly through posts for reasons of health or promotion, a permanent staff of Creole, local, or Indigenous practitioners managed observatories on the ground (Arnold, 2006). They were also sites in which go-betweens, interlocuters who could navigate between and across Indigenous and European cultures, shaped knowledge production (Schaffer, et al., 2009; Metcalf, 2006; Schiebinger, 2004). Histories of these institutional spaces have shown how their sciences blended colonial ambitions at managing labor with local practices. In the Madras Observatory in British India, for example, the “Brahmin assistant” incorporated longer traditions of South Indian scribal knowledge and practice, while colonial administrators established schools based on Tamil education to train “half-caste” orphans as surveyors (Kumar, 2022). In this way, practitioners embedded colonial scientific knowledge production with local hierarchies and labor forms already in place (Kumar, 2022).

Nineteenth-century Prussian polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt revolutionized the study of global climate patterns with the invention of isothermal lines, the wavy lines drawn on a map to connect places of equal temperature. This visual technology overturned the long-held belief that climates were the same across latitudes, a conviction that had fostered several questionable agricultural and botanical ventures, including attempts to replicate French vineyards in Canada (Parsons, 2018). Instead, isothermal lines accounted for altitude, prevailing winds, and ocean currents to differentiate mean temperature across the globe.

By the 19th century, the study of climate, and medical climatology by extension, became multi-scalar. Scholars often assume that the notion of a global climate was a project of the postwar era, but more recent literature has emphasized deeper roots of diverse global climatic imaginaries (Barnett, 2019; Coen, 2018). Deborah Coen (2018) has argued that such multi-scalar thinking was necessary for imperial states like the Hapsburg Empire to consolidate knowledge from the wide range of its imperial rule. Meanwhile, even as late-19th-century climate science increasingly cohered around multi-scalar meteorological networks, statistical data, and atmospheric physics, climate science was mired in uncertainty. Joseph Giacomelli (2023) has shown that the search for certainty in weather predictions and climate modeling corresponded, paradoxically, with increasing anxiety around the specter of uncertainty. Like multi-scalar imaginaries, the problem of uncertainty not only is not new, but has been embroiled in climate science since the days of the robber barons.

The Health of Places

Bodies were permeable in the early modern world, susceptible to the slightest change in their surroundings. The conviction that some places were healthier than others fostered a tradition of health-seeking, by which ailing individuals would search for places to soothe their afflicted constitutions (Nash, 2006; Valenčius, 2004). In doing so, patients and physicians created a hierarchy of places based on perceived healthiness. A stay at such a place could be temporary, for a few weeks or a season, or permanent, as when families relocated, or white colonists sought out new land to settle. By the mid- to late 19th century, the study of climate and health had branched into several interlocking disciplines: medical meteorology, medical climatology, medical geography, and medical topography (Valenčius, 2001).

In the 18th and 19th centuries, entrepreneurs responded to increasing popularity of health-seeking by creating spas and health resorts primarily in mountainous regions, where the crisp, clear air was thought to rejuvenate the constitution, or near hot springs, where physicians prescribed “taking the waters.” These health resorts could be sites of nationalist rhetoric, as in a mid-19th-century Virginia hot springs resort that catered to uniquely “southern” diseases and an exclusively white southern clientele (LaFauci, 2011). Elite clients in Europe and North America further regarded these health resorts as sites of high society socializing; necessary stops on the “Grand Tours” of the wealthy. Luxurious health resorts like L’Hotel Kursaal, perched scenically in the Swiss Alps, circulated meteorological data as proof of a healthful climate to entice physicians to prescribe a visit for their wealthier patients. Health-seeking was thus a cultural, social, and medical pursuit, rooted at once in ancient wisdom and cutting-edge climate science.

Health-seeking at resorts and spas remained an upper-class endeavor, with some exceptions in manufacturing towns, into the mid-19th century. But this changed in the late 19th century as railways expanded and travel became more accessible to middle- and then working-class health-seekers. The Progressive movement in the United States, combined with cheap travel and the increasing popularity of sea-bathing, encouraged the development of working-class seashore health resorts in places like Atlantic City and Coney Island. Even hospitals began to capitalize on the benefits of the sea. Children’s seashore hospitals outside New York City and Philadelphia opened near popular seaside destinations, animated by the emerging field of pediatrics, recent medical theory on the benefits of ozone and sunshine, and Progressive Era ideals around “child-saving” (Crnic & Connolly, 2009). When mothers accompanied their sick children to the hospital, they were lodged in hospital-run “Mothers Cottages” that physicians had strategically positioned for its residents to acquire the “full benefit of the sea breezes” (Crnic & Connolly, 2009). Even after the rise of germ theories in the 1880s, physicians remained convinced that a healthy climate, combined with food and rest, could help, or even cure, patients with ailments like tuberculosis.

Acclimation

Traveling could induce either health or sickness. Early modern Euro-colonial observers believed that human bodies underwent profound change—a “climate change” of sorts—through migration via the process of acclimation. Acclimation unfolded after people (or plants) were taken out of their presumed native environments and placed in a new one. Also known as “seasoning,” this shock to the system would register in a constellation of physiological and mental changes that could range from mild to severe (Anderson, 2006; Harrison, 1999; Seth, 2018; Valenčius, 2004). New places, with different temperatures, marshes, winds, dietary regimens, and so on, posed a very real threat to travelers, whose bodies had become accustomed to different climates. Those who ventured to such places and stayed there, ate local foods, mingled with local people, risked sickness in the short run and drastic physiological change in the long run as the body adjusted to its new environs.

Conevery Valenčius (2004) and Linda Nash (2006) have shown that people’s apprehensions around the health of places shaped migration patterns in the 19th-century United States, as settlers moved into lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. Settlers wanted to occupy places that were free from fevers, but they also wanted land that was rich for cultivation. The two did not always go hand in hand. Physicians debated the nature of acclimation, but all agreed that it happened. In 1841, the Board of Health of New Orleans—a city notorious for ill health, seasonal yellow fever epidemics, and, relatedly, a hot, humid climate—boldly declared that “the value of acclimation is worth the risk!” (The Times-Picayune, 1841, p. 2; Olivarius, 2022). This was a bold statement. Nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans regarded seasoning as, indeed, very risky; a process that could leave a person either strengthened by the endeavor, weakened, or dead. Prevailing medical theory held that yellow fever was miasmatic, arising from a toxic combination of climate, heat, soil, and filth. Urmi Engineer Willoughby (2017) has shown that the swampy urban environment and social ecologies of labor in New Orleans created the perfect breeding ground for the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes Aegypti. In 19th-century New Orleans, some new arrivals deliberately sought to acquire yellow fever, hoping to survive and so attain the much-valued status of immunity. But immunity was a social status as much as a medical one. Kathryn Olivarius (2022) has shown that white citizens could leverage their presumed immunity for material gain, while elites used perceived Black immunity to justify continued enslavement and oppression.

By the 19th century, medical geography had begun to appear in an array of guidebooks and advice manuals, and travelers and invalids themselves routinely chronicled the effects of local climates on their health (Valenčius, 2004). Those bound for New Orleans, medical geographer Timothy Flint warned, should note that “[t]he chance for an unacclimated young man from the north, for surviving the first summer is by some considered only as one to two” (Flint, 1828, p. 557). Physician Daniel Drake cautioned new migrants to Cincinnati to “expose themselves as little as possible, either to the evening air, or the noon day sun” to lessen the inevitable effects of seasoning (Drake, 1816, p. 181). Travelers tried to prepare in advance for how foreign climates would affect their bodies, accustomed as they were to climates at home. Seasoning was a process of displacement written on the human body.

The effects of travel on health fed both anxieties and aspirations about the relationship of place and body. After the rise of germ theories in the 1880s, health-seeking adapted to the logics of bacteriology (Mitman, 2007). Physicians prescribed fresh air into the 20th century, though instead of avoiding miasmas and “noxious exhalations” from the earth, patients pursued climates that were ostensibly free from germs. Older ideas persisted, albeit different in form and operating under distinct logics, to establish health-seeking as a long-standing, continued practice.

Imperial Improvement

A rich literature seeks to disentangle the snarls of Euro-colonial theories of the tropics. No climate matched the tropics in imperial obsession. Fears about tropical places, and ambitions to manipulate them for profit and power, lay at the heart of much of colonial policy and practice from the early modern era into the 20th century (Anderson, 2006). In the early modern era, most European colonists held a conviction that the tropics were harmful to their health, often even deadly. These theories spring from an ancient Greek conviction that the tropics were not only uninhabited but uninhabitable, located in a boiling, infertile, sun-scorched part of the world that in many ways resembled Hell (Gómez, 2008). The opposite extreme held true for the Arctic; frozen wastelands regarded similarly as hostile to human existence (Stuhl, 2016). European colonists regarded these places, and the people who lived there, as resources to be excavated and used. Sometimes, settlers went with the deliberate intention to change the climate, to make it more temperate and therefore healthier, with a final goal of attracting more white settlers.

The scientific revolution armed colonists with the conviction that the natural world was ordered by laws that, when uncovered, could be manipulated through the power of science and, especially, agricultural discipline. This was the doctrine of improvement, an ideology that rested on biblical notions of responsibility to cultivate landscapes, and which was further animated by the belief that rational knowledge of nature would allow for the best possible use of its resources (Drayton, 2000). It was no accident that this conviction stemmed from thinkers like Francis Bacon, who himself was a prominent legislator in England with financial ties to several imperial ventures that included serving on the Council for the Virginia Company of London. Furthermore, the doctrine of improvement became part of the legal system of many colonial governments, maintaining the notion that colonists could lay claim to land through agricultural cultivation, and denigrated Indigenous land-management techniques as mismanagement.

The project of becoming healthful extended not only to hot climates, but also to places deemed too cold: both the freezing Arctic and sweltering tropics were threatening landscapes to be improved, tamed, and ordered under colonial logics. For example, in the lands that would become Canada and the northeastern United States, colonists anticipated that through deforestation and agricultural improvement, the climate would become more healthful and civilized (Zilberstein, 2017). By the 1780s, Harvard naturalist Samuel Williams declared that after 150 years of settlement, the New England climate had become “more temperate, equal, and mild,” a direct and deliberate consequence of human action. If colonists kept it up, he promised, these forms of change could modulate the turbulent climates of the world, “so long as diligence, industry, and agriculture shall mark the conduct of mankind” (Zilberstein, 2017, p. 2). Colonists’ conviction that the climate was becoming warmer belies contemporary proxy data that indicate a general trend of cooling during the Little Ice Age. Williams’s embodied experience of local weather patterns is a reminder that engaging climate is a political and cultural exercise as well as a response to empirical conditions.

In British India, a place that British colonists called “the land of death” for the high rate of death and disease they faced, improvement took two prongs (Arnold, 2006). On the one hand, colonists wanted to improve the land to make it profitable and, relatedly, healthy. But alongside the pragmatic desire to profit from the landscape was an aesthetic component driven by a fear of untamable landscapes like jungles and the intractable peoples they might contain. Intervention into tropical landscapes was a matter of political, medical, and moral concern. Consider how one colonial official described his ambitions in 1821:

The draining of marshes, the cultivation of large tracts of country now not only useless, but the resort of savage beasts and the source of severe diseases—the improvement of stock—the creation of a larger quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life, and of raw materials for manufactures.

(Arnold, 2006, pp. 106–107)

This was an imperative to transform what colonists saw as the wild geographies of India into a constellation of orderly hedgerows and neat garden plots reminiscent of agrarian England. By conquering nature, eradicating the diseases its climate contained, English colonists believed they could conquer rebellious, intransigent Indians as well.

But the ideology of improvement was not uncontroversial. As efforts were underway to modify landscapes in pursuit of profit, climatic theories were also inspiring a colonial branch of conservation efforts aimed at challenging deforestation to protect the tropical, Edenic islands that colonial officials found so enchanting (Grove, 1995). In both contexts, Indigenous people informed colonial efforts even as frameworks of improvement and conservation erased the existence of them and their knowledges through rhetoric of “virgin,” uninhabited, static landscapes. An outpouring of scholarship over the last two decades has shown that, far from being peripheries where scientific knowledge lagged, colonies were centers of knowledge production. Pablo Gómez (2018) and Cameron Strang (2018) have shown how natural knowledge in imperial contexts was imbued with the overlapping cultural, environmental, and political contexts of a multiplicity of imperial actors. Colonists relied on Indigenous guides to navigate unfamiliar climates and sought out Indigenous healers and remedies for the ills that befell them in the places they sought to conquer. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt (1992), Londa Schiebinger (2004) and others have argued that these sites were “bio-contact zones” where go-betweens, including interpreters, spies, guides, messengers, and other interlocuters shaped the boundaries and pursuits not only of natural knowledge, but of inter-cultural encounters more broadly (Schaffer et al., 2009).

While the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are a rough gauge, “the tropics” was a designation in flux, as much a cultural as geographic label, meant to invoke a set of assumptions about the flora, fauna, and peoples who lived there. The foil to the tropics was the supposedly civilized climate of the temperate zone. The tropics was a paradox, imagined either as the infernally hot, barren fringes of a world with the Mediterranean basin at its center, or a fertile, bountiful garden with rich soil and plentiful labor (Gómez, 2008). These twin imaginaries persisted for centuries in perpetual tension, as they fueled colonial fears that the tropics had a vein of instability that subverted the order of empire.

White settlers expressed profound anxiety over the effect hot climates would have on them from the earliest days of colonial expansion into the 20th century. The royalist Richard Ligon fled England in 1647 and spent 3 years in Barbados, where he spent his days writing down what he saw. He described his first encounter with the West Indies by saying that it was hardly to be believed that one from a cold climate like England could “indure such scorching without being suffocated” (Ligon, 1657, 9). He and his companions, Ligon elaborated, experienced a “great failing in the vigour, and sprightliness we have in colder Climates” (Ligon, 1657, p. 27).

Climatic essentialism was also integral to the medico-legal justifications for slavery. Prevailing medical discourse, alongside colonial embodied experience, mixed with perceptions about tropical peoples to shape the development of race slavery in the Americas. Enslavers used the alleged biological suitability of African peoples for hot, humid, or diseased environments as a rationale for their enslavement and forced labor on plantations, conditions they believed killed or enervated temperate whites. Beliefs about where certain races belonged and where others did not solidified a tropical-temperate dichotomy, which continues to shape contemporary geographic imaginaries, but also racialized the tropics as a place of nonwhite labor. Theories of race and belonging were thus stitched into ideas about climate.

Nineteenth-century Black intellectuals and activists fiercely challenged these theories. Ikuko Asaka (2017) and Colin Fisher (2021) have shown how Black abolitionists not only contested prevailing theories of climatic essentialism used to justify slavery and Black labor in the tropics, but also put forward radically different theories of climate. Black abolitionists like Martin Delany and William Henry Harrison critiqued climatic essentialism, arguing, among other things, that Black and white inhabitants in North America constituted a new race, or that Black migrants were more adept than whites at acclimating to new climates (Fisher, 2021). As self-emancipated intellectual and activist Henry Bibb dryly pointed out, when slavery was legal in Canada, “there was no complaint about the climate’s being too cold for the colored people” (Asaka, 2017, p. 1; Bibb, 1851). Such critiques held purchase beyond North America, as well. In the mid to late 19th century, a cadre of Brazilian physicians known as the “Tropicalistas” challenged similarly deterministic assumptions about the tropics at the core of European climatic-medical thought. However, these debates operated within the intellectual framework of Euro-colonial medicine, and both reflected and reinforced the implicit belief that this was the arena of scientific legitimacy (Peard, 1999). This scientific basis for legitimacy of tropical degeneracy and temperate civility endured well into the 20th century, and arguably the 21st, even as climate science and meteorology became more aligned with physical-mathematical orientations to atmospheric processes (Gómez, 2008).

Climate Science, Meteorology, and Medicine in the 20th Century

Meteorology and medicine—at one point closely intertwined professions—diverged in the wake of several disciplinary shifts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that reoriented the two fields away from each other. By the mid-20th century, physicians no longer cited the weather as a prevailing causal factor in human health, though health resorts and sanitaria were slower to shed pronouncements of its healing virtues (Jennings, 2006). Initially, in the wake of the Bacteriological Revolution in the late 19th century, public health officials retained a focus on the health of places, shifting their attention from miasmas to germs. The link between germs and filth, with all the implied cultural and social connotations, persisted into the early 21st century. But while prescribing travel cures and sea breezes for ailments has largely faded from contemporary medical practice, there remains a conviction that “fresh air” and sunshine benefit health, especially among children (Crnic & Kondo, 2019).

Climatic and meteorological sciences also diverged in the first half of the 20th century, especially as climatology was associated with climatic essentialism and, later, eugenic theories around “civilizing” climates. Geographer Ellsworth Huntington (1915) famously argued that only temperate climates could foster the collective mental capacity for complex civilizations (by which he meant “Western” civilization), a view with roots in early modern theories of climate and colonialism. Meanwhile, the rise of national weather services in North America and Europe alongside imperial observatory networks allowed a stream of standardized meteorological data to crisscross the globe. Historian Greg Cushman (2004) has shown that these research stations worked in part as imperial beacons of enlightened science, continuing to foster reliance on Euro-colonial technoscience in colonized and formerly colonized nations. Through imperial observatory stations, the structures of colonial meteorology continued to shape research priorities as well as geopolitical alignment.

Early 20th-century meteorologists divided their attention between analyses of local weather patterns and the connections of these patterns with the broader context of a global atmosphere. The concept of climate expanded to account for the chemical composition of the atmosphere, including the upper atmosphere, increasingly accessible with the rise of aviation. Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes, along with Austrian meteorologist Julius Hann, influenced the shift to a scientific regard for climate and weather as strictly physical phenomena apart from natural history and human health (Coen, 2018). This was an era during which physicists and meteorologists refined the mathematical techniques of meteorology, stitching weather forecasting to developments in atmospheric physics that remain at the core of modern meteorology and forecasting (Pietruska, 2017).

The Cold War

The rise of computer modeling in the 1960s transformed climate science. There is debate on the extent to which computer modeling reoriented the field, or simply provided new frameworks for older theories. Regardless, it had an outsized effect on how practitioners framed research questions and conceptualized climate. The study of atmospheric processes became a quantifiable pursuit in climate science, similarly to meteorology, that was framed according to physical laws and expressed in mathematical equations. In climate science, the most important ramification of this shift was an increasingly globalized view, for technical reasons of how computer modeling accounts for knots of influential phenomena. In doing so, it diverged sharply from older, location-based studies of climate that characterized climatology and informed lay practices like health-seeking.

During the Cold War, meteorology and climate science became oriented to a new and insidious risk to human health: an imagined nuclear war (Howe, 2014). In 1955, congressional hearings on the meteorological and medical aftermaths of fallout called on witnesses including Weather Bureau research director Harry Wexler and other meteorologists to predict how fallout would travel along currents of air, or how a nuclear bomb dropped in one place might influence another. Jerry Jessee (2014) has argued that various meteorological studies on fallout range not only affirmed that fallout could circulate on a global scale, but also contributed to both scientific and lay “views of the Earth as a spatially interconnected and fragile ecosphere” (Jessee, 2014, p. 156). Animated by fears over invisible radiation, medical experts, too, examined the physiological consequences of radiation fallout. American scientists and physicians studied Japanese populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as in the Marshall Islands, to examine radiation poisoning relative to distance from the hypocenter and other social, geographic, and medical factors (Hatakeyama, 2021).

The Cold War also focused climatic and meteorological attention onto political and health-related problems like food availability and agriculture. Health concerns related to climate similarly became articulated through sociopolitical responses to climatic anomalies that caused drought and, subsequently, famine. For example, famines associated with climatic anomalies in the late 1960s and early 1970s amplified the problem of food shortage, as millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia, as well as in North Korea and China perished from malnutrition (Nicholson, 2018). In the United States, the memory of the 1930s “Dust Bowl” phenomenon in the wake of prolonged drought in the Midwest was still acute 30 years later. Food crises like these are political events and have historically been major catalysts for change, including rebellion and migration. Several famines associated with drought brought renewed attention to the relationship between food supply and climate, though just as many were the result of socioeconomic policy and political negligence.

Part III: Historical Climatology

With roots in in mid-20th century environmental histories that sought to position human actors in the backdrop of broader natural processes, historical climatology has burgeoned in the 21st century into a robust field of analysis (Lamb, 1982; Le Roy Ladurie, 1967). Pairing front-line science on past climate reconstruction like dendrochronological data, soil samples, and ice core data, alongside analyses of historical sources, scholars in this field have interrogated how past climatic conditions informed and constrained human action. Correlating weather extremes with social pressures, they have asked how past societies have adapted to changing climates as well as attending to how people in the past understood and made sense of what was happening around them. In the United States, this scholarship is particularly robust on the Little Ice Age and within historical disaster studies. Taken together, they show that social responses to weather extremes cannot be understood without attending to past social worlds and uneven distributions of power.

Little Ice Age

North America and Europe experienced roughly comparable lowered Little Ice Age (LIA) temperatures from roughly 1300 to 1800. Using data from dendrochronological sources (tree rings and pollen), historical climatologists have established that the LIA was much more than regular, gradual decreases in temperature; rather, it was characterized by highly variable, loosely connected meteorological phenomena including, but not limited to, droughts, storms, freezing winters, and humid summers. But it was characterized more by instability than anything else.

Historian Tom Wickman (2018) has critiqued climate historians’ “reflexive” impulse to highlight stories of collapse and crisis, arguing that on the ground, people adapted to the harsh conditions of the LIA with startling ingenuity; many places paint a picture of plenty rather than scarcity. In the early American Northeast, Wickman argues, Indigenous groups maintained their sovereignty in part due to their comfort with and knowledge of winter ecologies. Harsh, snowy winters were a time of security for Wabanakis and other Native Americans in the region. It was colonists who struggled and relied on Indigenous knowledge to survive. It was only through the adoption of Indigenous technologies to manage the cold like snowshoes that early colonists gained a critical foothold of power.

At the same time, environmental stressors like severe cold and drought exacerbated preexisting tensions and heightened hunger and disease. In colonial New England, colonial ineptitude, coupled with a series of poorly timed storms that blew supply ships off course, fostered conditions of resource insecurity and profound food scarcity. Observing that “hunger and violence often traveled in lock-step,” Katherine Grandjean (2011) argues that competition for food shaped the political and ecological conditions for outbreaks of violence like the Pequot War, culminating in the indiscriminate colonial slaughter of Pequot people in 1638. The problem was not simply weather—there is no “intrinsically bad” climate, as historian Sam White (2017) points out—but in colonists’ misguided expectations and lack of preparation for such conditions. Like Grandjean, White (2017) has similarly shown how harsh LIA conditions contributed to misfortunes in the Jamestown colony, especially the drought conditions of the “starving time” during the winter of 1609–1610, which was so severe that some colonists resorted to cannibalism.

Disasters

Meteorological disasters from extreme heat, cold, wind, rain, and ice have affected human health, not least because of the spikes in disease that follow most weather-related disasters. Studies on the health effects of such disasters have sought to situate a wide range of weather-forming processes, including heat waves, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and drought in social and political context. These questions are animated by a broader conversation that interrogates both how disasters affect societies and how diverse peoples have understood and responded to extreme weather, using climate reconstruction data from proxy records alongside historical meteorological data to do so. Overwhelmingly, these studies show that the term “natural disaster” is an oxymoron, and that many horrors in the wake of disasters are catastrophes of preparedness, civil rights, and social welfare—not climate (Steinberg, 2000). In this context, scholars have worked to situate medical emergencies following disasters as socially, culturally, and politically contingent, both to understand the past and prepare for the future.

The health conditions following volcanic eruptions are wide ranging and have garnered increasing interest among scholars as a way of examining what life might be like in the wake of solar geoengineering projects (Kolbert, 2022). Of particular interest is the eruption of Tambora in Sumbawa in 1814, which precipitated the infamous “Year Without a Summer,” also known bleakly at the time as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” (Oppenheimer, 2011; Wood, 2014). Apart from the devastating immediate effects of the eruption—burns, suffocation—scholars have paid particular attention to the spike in cholera epidemics across the northern hemisphere in the wake of global cooling (Wood, 2014). The combination of densely populated urban centers, malnutrition from famine, poor sanitary conditions, and faster travel facilitated the spread of cholera from the Indian subcontinent, across the Russian Empire and into Europe, Africa, and the United States in the early 19th century. The cholera pandemic was only one of numerous social and political stressors associated with the Tambora eruption; harvest failure, reform movements, riots, xenophobia, and scapegoating all unfolded in otherwise diverse contexts around the world in the wake of the profound climatic stress (Wood, 2014).

Adverse health conditions during epidemics and famine are compounded by a lack of basic sanitation and public health infrastructure, but also by the economic priorities of those in power. During drought and famine in British India, brought on by El Niño events in the last third of the 19th century, British imperialists worked tirelessly to maintain the free-market status quo to ship vast quantities of resources to England, condemning millions of people in India to starvation. Mike Davis (2000) has argued that the famine was a human-caused event, as there were no shortages of food, only imperial mismanagement that shipped it all out of the country. The catastrophe was one of resource administration and human choices, not resources themselves.

Scholars in the history of disasters have continued to show how political priorities and environmental crises are mutually reinforcing phenomena that can exacerbate weather-related hazards. For example, scholarship on heat waves and hurricanes have demonstrated how some of the most acute health crises of climate change affect some places worse than others for reasons well beyond geographic susceptibility. Scholars like Rick Keller (2015) and Eric Klinenberg (2002) argue that high fatality rates during heat waves are refracted along socioeconomic lines, reproducing an array of social and environmental factors. These range from the social isolation of seniors and the breakdown of civic institutions during extreme weather events to the slow violence of poverty.

Taking a similar approach, Andy Horwitz (2020, p. 3) has also argued that disasters are “less discrete events than they are contingent processes.” In his study of Hurricane Katrina and its devastating impact on New Orleans in 2005, Horwitz traces the history of policies that layered hierarchy into the fabric of the city, shaping recovery programs that “favored white people over African American people, wealthy people over poor people, and people who owned homes over people who rented them” (Horwitz, 2020, p. 5). The health effects from such a hurricane go beyond the violence of winds and flooding on the human frame, though these are certainly significant. Rather, they are determined by long histories of environmental racism, flawed mid-century drainage and engineering projects, and the storm itself. The medical crises of Hurricane Katrina were compounded by its hideous aftermath, from the spike in police brutality toward people of color in the days after the storm, to the distribution of formaldehyde-contaminated Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, to flood victims for months and years after the fact (Shapiro, 2015). Medical emergencies that unfold after hurricanes are also the result of longer-term environmental policy: the widespread destruction of marshlands that are not only carbon sinks but buffer zones between the ocean and the shore have exacerbated impacts from events like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Sandy (2012) in New Jersey. Politics and ecology lay the groundwork for preventable loss of life.

Conclusion

In June 2022, the American Medical Association formally declared the climate crisis a medical emergency, joining a chorus of voices calling attention to health effects from “heat-related injuries, vector-borne diseases and air pollution from wildfires, to worsening seasonal allergies and storm-related illness and injuries.” While this was welcome news, it was reactive, arriving only after decades of activism around the climate crisis as a persistent threat to health.

As our planetary emergency introduces harms to health that are both foreign and familiar, scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly turning to weather, climate, and health as critical sites of inquiry. In embracing diverse disciplinary orientations between the sub-fields of history and historical climatology, recent work has introduced a range of methodological possibilities that can frame contemporary concerns about climate change in ways relevant to how one thinks about the past, present, and future. While collaboration between historians and climate scientists has been choppy, owing in part to differences in disciplinary sub-cultures and academic priorities for publishing, there have been new avenues for collaboration in the early 21st century. Environmental historians and climate scientists have, in recent decades, fostered compelling models of interdisciplinary partnership. Historians have served on IPCC panels and written broadly on the cultural history of climate and climate science for both scholarly and popular audiences (Caretta et al., 2022; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). There is a need, however, for stronger partnerships between historians of medicine and climate with climate science more broadly, and there are several open avenues for analysis.

Recent work in epidemic history has sharpened historical perspectives on the intersection between vector-borne diseases and ecology, which has become an acute contemporary concern during COVID-19. There is urgency for continued work on emerging diseases related to climate change or changing ecological niches; Lyme disease, for example, has seen an uptick in the U.S. Northeast as the region has become warmer. It would be to the benefit of all to take the entanglements of sickness and health with issues of climate as a central focus. By identifying sites of overlap between those who study human health and those who study atmospheric processes, historians and practitioners can potentially offer scope and context for the creation of more equitable responses to climate change and its disproportionate consequences for health.

Further Reading

  • Anderson, K. (2005). Predicting the weather: Victorians and the science of meteorology. University of Chicago Press.
  • Asaka, I. (2017). Tropical freedom: Climate, settler colonialism, and Black exclusion in the age of emancipation. Duke University Press.
  • Coen, D. (2018). Climate in motion: Science, empire, and the problem of scale. University of Chicago Press.
  • Davis, M. (2000). Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the Third World. Verso.
  • Golinski, J. (2007). British weather and the climate of enlightenment. University of Chicago Press.
  • Horwitz, A. (2020). Katrina: A history, 1915–2015. Harvard University Press.
  • Jankovic, V. (2001). Reading the skies: A cultural history of English weather, 1650–1820. University of Chicago Press.
  • Oreskes, N., & Conway, M. (2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to climate change. Bloomsbury.
  • Taylor, S. (2021). Age of disability: On living well with impaired landscapes. Orion, 40(4), 14–23.
  • Valenčius, C. B. (2004). The health of the country: How American settlers understood themselves and their land. Basic Books.
  • Wickman, T. (2018). Snowshoe country: An environmental and cultural history of winter in the early American Northeast. Cambridge University Press.

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