Health and Weather in Unfavourable Environments: Exploring the Historical Dynamics of Colonial Medical Meteorology in nineteenth-century Tropical Asia

Abstract

Medical meteorology had a long precedent in medical thought across Eastern and Western traditions. This article considers the tradition of medical meteorology that was favoured by Western doctors in the nineteenth century, which was often applied within colonial contexts to the understanding of new climates and how they might impact on human health. Looking at British-held tropical and sub-tropical colonies of the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong respectively, medical meteorology was stimulated by the new pathological and atmospheric conditions that European explorers and settlers now inhabited in the name of the British Empire. They brought with them concepts of disease causation and of climate underpinned by centuries of Hippocratic and Aristotelian thought that was by 1800 merging with newer empirical and systematic, observation-based scientific method. Drawing on the ancient theoretical grounding, climate was thought to play a significant role in determining human health, nature, and development which, combined with an emerging body of new instrumental weather observations enabled doctors to look for patterns of cause and effect between climate and the human condition or particular and extreme weathers and disease.[1]

[1] Heymann, 2010, pp. 582-583.