In his later years, nineteenth-century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took to carrying a barometer with him to foresee what “indispositions” he risked from each day’s weather.
Goethe’s contemporary, French Maine de Biran, wrote, “There is no atmospheric change, no matter how slight, which escapes by sensitive system.”
It was the worst for Friedrich Nietzsche, the acutely weather-vulnerable German philosopher. “His whole body is a pressure gauge,” observed his biographer, Stefan Zweig. “He is a living barometer.”
Goethe, de Biran, and Nietzsche weren’t the first weather sensitives to leave a record of their irritations. Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine, in his pre-Christian “On Airs, Waters, and Places” describes links between humans and weather.
In his advice to physicians, he helped lay the foundation for a future science. “Whoever wishes to pursue the science of medicine properly must proceed thus,” advised Hippocrates. “First, he ought to consider what effect each season of the year can produce, for the seasons are not alike but differ widely both in themselves and at their changes.
“Through these considerations, and by learning the weather beforehand, the doctor will have available full knowledge to help him in each specific case.”
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Today that “full knowledge” may be accumulating in a new, expanding science that studies biometeorology –a multidisciplinary field that studies the effects of atmospheric phenomena on all life.
Biometeorology identifies and studies connections between atmospheric effects and specific biological reactions to them, such as the advent of winter and chronic depression, cold fronts,and asthma attacks; hot weather and aggression; solar activity and the earth’s magnetic field fluctuations and heart attacks.
Biometeorologists are finding that our behavior, mood, and health may be much more intimately connected to the vagaries of the weather than we suspected.
We may be able to make practical adjustments in our lifestyle, home environment, even attitude, that could prevent, for example, the cold season from becoming the winter of our discontent.
In 1982, winter discontent and the chronic depression that engulfs many people between September and April got a name. Alfred Lewy, M.D., a clinical psychobiologist, and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health (NiMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, labeled it Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, removing the condition from the fold of psychiatry and delivering it to the barometers of biometeorology.
In an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Lewydescribed the case of Larry Pressman, a sixty-three-year-old man suffering from seasonal-related manic-depression syndrome.
For half his life, Pressman had experienced a dramatic decrease in energy, mood, and functioning, accompanied by oversleeping and overeating, beginning with each mid-summer, and climaxing at Christmas, and finally turning into a manic cheerfulness in March.
His doctors told him he had “Christmas depression syndrome” and prescribed antidepressants, which gave him unpleasant side effects and no relief.
What lightened Pressman’s seasonal depression, Lewy discovered, was light itself. Pressman’s daily exposure to bright sunlight (his photoperiod) was artificially lengthened with brightlamps to provide six more hours of sunlight daily, comparable to a sun-drenched day in April.
Within four days, Pressman’s depression lifted, and he regained his energy and enthusiasm during winter for the first time in decades.
The synthetic sunlight made a difference. Lewy theorized, because of its effect on melatonin, a pineal gland hormone which has a tranquilizing effect. Its purpose is to prepare the body for sleep, and its presence in the blood usually increases considerably at dusk each day, especially in the short photoperiod winter months.
The bright synthetic sunlight suppressed Pressman’s melatonin activity and gave him relief.
Meanwhile, according to studies on Psycho-Physiological Rhythms in Paris, most of the physiological processes in the human body are constantly being modified by climate and weather, “as the body’s regulatory systems are overcome by atmospheric disturbances caused when fronts are passing.”
Cold fronts are correlated with increased heart attacks, almost doubling their incidence, reported one medical researcher. What is more, post-operative complications often coincide with fronts—sixty percent of the complications with cold fronts and thirty percent with warm.
Cases in angina pectoris follow a marked seasonal pattern, peaking in autumn and winter, while a study of 1.6 million patients with circulatory ailments showed a peak in January and February.
Wind, too, apparently may be troublesome. “He who knows the origin of winds, of thunder, and of weather, also knows where diseases come from,” observed sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus.
Sometimes labeled the “father of depression,” wind can makemany people feel awful. Typical symptoms, for instance, include physical weakness, irritability, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, nightmares, nausea, apathy, depression, and a tendency to quarrel.
The injurious effects of “ill wind,” say biometeorologists, seem to come from an over-abundance of positive ions, electronically charged oxygen molecules, in the atmosphere.
Negative ions, on the other hand, seem to have a calming, healing effect on humans.
A key factor, in the meantime, linking ions and human comfort often is termed “Serotonin hyperfunction syndrome.” Serotonin is a brain neurotransmitter and mood-altering substance that instructs brain cells to relax the body and feel drowsy.
A high positive ion concentration apparently depresses serotonin levels. Researchers discovered that unpleasant effects of the syndrome are felt as much as twelve hours prior to changes in atmospheric ion levels.
The “Butterfly Effect” in weather means that a tiny, local, random perturbation of the weather system can have enormous, cumulative repercussions elsewhere.
“A butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform systems next month in New York,” observed one meteorologiston the Weather Channel recently.
To follow up on our lead introduction paragraph, as Goethesneezed in Weimer, Germany, the human barometer poet, no doubt, would have noted the wing colors on that distant butterfly.
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Top o’ the morning!
