The Weather Doctors: When Atmospheric Science Explained Disease

An Essay

1. Introduction

This essay draws from Daniel Roytas’s book Can You Catch a Cold?, which documents a medical tradition that dominated human understanding of epidemic disease for thousands of years before vanishing from public memory within a single generation. Roytas compiles historical medical literature, epidemiological surveys, and physician accounts to reconstruct how doctors once explained influenza and respiratory illness—not through contagion, but through atmospheric phenomena.

The physicians who practiced this approach were called weather doctors or medical meteorologists. They believed changes in barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, electrical atmospheric influence, wind patterns, ozone concentrations, and other meteorological factors triggered epidemic outbreaks. For most of human history, this was not alternative medicine. It was simply medicine. The questions these practitioners raised about the pace, scope, timing, and direction of epidemic spread were never satisfactorily answered before their tradition collapsed. Roytas’s work brings those questions back into view.

2. The Forgotten Orthodoxy

In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates established a formal connection between meteorological conditions and epidemics. He instructed physicians to consider the seasons, the winds, and atmospheric changes when investigating disease. The theory of meteorological causation became so widely accepted that it inspired an entire medical specialty. Medical meteorology produced its own practitioners, its own research methods, its own body of literature.

This was not a brief enthusiasm. Even though the Persian physician Ibn Sina proposed contagion theory in 1025, meteorological explanations prevailed for centuries afterward. In fact, contagion theory progressively weakened. By the mid-1800s—more than 800 years after Ibn Sina—the doctrine of contagion had nearly collapsed. Medical texts referred to it as a remnant of childish thinking.

The numbers reveal the consensus. In 1800, Dr. Thomas Beddoes surveyed 170 physicians during an influenza epidemic. Nine out of ten reported that influenza was not contagious, primarily because healthy people routinely failed to contract the disease despite living and working alongside the sick. By 1820, fewer than six physicians in all of Philadelphia practiced under contagion theory. As late as 1925, a survey of over 2,000 people found that only half considered the common cold contagious.

Medical meteorology was the orthodoxy. Contagion was the fringe position struggling for acceptance.

3. What Weather Doctors Observed

Weather doctors tracked specific atmospheric variables and correlated them with disease outbreaks. They measured barometric pressure, temperature, humidity levels, wind direction and speed, ozone concentrations, and what they termed actinic effects—likely referring to solar radiation. They believed these factors either triggered illness directly or created conditions in the atmosphere that disrupted normal bodily function.

Dr. George Ross documented a pattern across the influenza epidemics of 1832, 1837, and 1842. In every instance, weather conditions remained dry and frosty for several days before the outbreak. When conditions abruptly shifted to damp and foggy, influenza spread widely within a short period. Ross theorized that air saturated with moisture impaired respiratory tract function and mucous membrane activity, creating the disturbance that manifested as influenza.

William Prout published the first empirical observations linking atmospheric pressure to disease in 1836. He recorded increased air pressure during England’s first cholera outbreak. He also proposed that volcanic eruptions or earthquakes could release sufficient particulate matter through atmospheric crevices to contaminate vast areas and trigger diseases like influenza.

Dr. John Charles Atkinson investigated how temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure related to influenza outbreaks. He found significant atmospheric differences over remarkably short distances—sometimes just meters apart. This explained why people on one side of a road developed influenza while those on the other side remained unaffected. Like Ross, Atkinson identified a pattern: epidemics seemed to begin when conditions shifted from cold, frosty, and dry to damp and humid.

These were not vague impressions. Weather doctors were collecting measurements, documenting patterns, and attempting to establish causal mechanisms.

4. The Problem of Simultaneity

The most compelling evidence for atmospheric causation was the speed at which epidemics appeared across vast distances. Dr. Alexander Jones observed that influenza spread across North America and the West Indies faster than person-to-person transmission could possibly account for. He considered this fact alone sufficient to eliminate contagion as the mode of spread.

During the Russian influenza pandemic of 1889-1890, people in cities thousands of kilometers apart fell ill on the same day. Contagion theory required the pathogen to travel between these cities—by ship, rail, or human carrier—taking days or weeks. Yet the simultaneity of onset suggested something else was at work.

Dr. Erasmus Darwin remarked in 1794 that influenza attacked so many people at the same time and spread over such great distances that it must be disseminated by the atmosphere. Dr. James Woodforde agreed, stating that influenza was not primarily contagious but owed its source to atmospheric conditions. Professor August Hirsch noted in 1883 that evidence for influenza being contagious was lacking, and it would be difficult to classify it as a communicable disease.

After an 1837 epidemic in Great Britain, a medical association surveyed its members about whether they possessed proof of person-to-person transmission. The responses were entirely negative. Not one doctor had definitive evidence.

The speed of spread remained unexplained by contagion models.

5. The Directional Mystery

In 1845, The Royal Society of Medicine established a statistical committee to investigate the relationship between weather and epidemic diseases. The committee collected data across 11 European countries over four to seven years. Their dataset encompassed over four million cases.

One committee member, Frederik Bremer, tested whether easterly winds carried contaminated air, which would explain why epidemics spread from east to west. His findings contradicted the hypothesis but revealed something more puzzling: epidemics always spread east to west, regardless of which direction prevailing winds blew.

This pattern appeared consistently in historical and epidemiological data. Member of Parliament Henry Labouchere stated in 1890 that pandemics always spread from east to west, never from west to east. This broad environmental trend was incompatible with contagion theory. If influenza spread person-to-person, it should radiate outward from an epicenter in all directions, following human social behavior and travel routes.

Wind direction varied. Human movement varied. Yet the directional pattern remained constant.

No contagion model could account for this.

6. Isolation Paradoxes

Perhaps the most perplexing evidence came from isolated populations that developed influenza despite having no contact with the outside world.

During the Russian influenza pandemic, sailors aboard a ship in the middle of the ocean contracted the disease mid-voyage. For a virus to cause this, it would need to travel from the mainland on air currents in sufficient quantities to infect the crew. Yet soldiers in regular close contact with those same sailors remained unaffected.

Commanders at Fort Tregear, deep in the Lushai Hills of India, reported that soldiers stationed there contracted influenza despite minimal contact with the outside world. The only explanation they could offer was that the germ had somehow traveled 2,500 kilometers, carried on a contaminated letter.

During the Spanish flu pandemic, Alaska experienced one of the highest mortality rates per capita anywhere in the world, despite having just 50,000 people dispersed across an area the size of Europe. Travel was limited to dog teams covering no more than 50 kilometers per day in brutal conditions. Some towns were so remote that news of World War I’s end took over a month to arrive. Yet the pandemic swept through.

In hospitals, patients sharing wards with influenza cases often remained completely unaffected, while nursing staff developed the disease. In other hospitals, not a single nurse became infected despite treating countless patients. In large households, one or two family members would fall ill while the rest remained well.

These patterns were routine observations, not anomalies. They suggested something other than person-to-person transmission was at work.

7. The Practitioners

Thomas Sydenham, known as the English Hippocrates and the Prince of English Physicians, became interested in why people exhibited identical symptoms simultaneously during epidemic diseases. Working with Robert Boyle, Sydenham theorized that effluvium released from beneath the Earth contaminated the atmosphere and interacted with physical qualities like moisture, dryness, heat, and cold. These atmospheric changes disrupted the four reciprocal humors of the body, which were also moist, dry, hot, and cold. This disruption caused conditions like influenza.

John Arbuthnot published “An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on the Human Body” in 1733, describing how different seasons affected people and proposing that specific atmospheric characteristics of each season induced different disease states.

Christian Fibiger, a Dutch physician, ran his own weather station and recorded atmospheric observations up to nine times daily. By 1860, he had compiled over 50,000 measurements. He statistically analyzed relationships between weather events and epidemic disease for his doctoral dissertation, “On the Influence of Climate on the Genesis of Disease.” Fibiger concluded that meteorological changes, particularly temperature fluctuations, were the primary cause of influenza.

American revolutionary Benjamin Rush initially supported contagion theory but later recanted. He argued that quarantine laws were worse than useless, declaring that thousands of lives had been sacrificed through faith in their efficacy, which led to neglect of domestic cleanliness. Rush inspired students like Charles Caldwell, who was appointed to Philadelphia’s Board of Health in 1803 and promoted anti-contagionist positions.

Robert Tytler, a surgeon in the Bengal Infantry, found it strange that Hippocrates never mentioned contagion. In his 1834 lecture “Refutation of the Doctrine of Contagion,” Tytler asked how the venerable founder of healing could have omitted such a conspicuous fact if contagion were true. He called contagion a dreadful and mischievous error pervading medical science, leading to horrible quarantine laws and violations of humanitarian duty.

8. The Resistance to Contagion

By the early 1800s, fewer than ten percent of the medical profession in the United Kingdom believed influenza was contagious. The other ninety percent remained unconvinced.

Charles Larkin wrote in 1825 that the dogma of contagion had no foundation in fact but was based on misapprehension and inaccurate observation. It was revered only because it was believed by fathers and grandfathers. Like other weather doctors, Larkin pointed toward environmental factors as causal or at minimum significant contributors to epidemic outbreaks.

After his thorough investigation in 1800, Thomas Beddoes called for the idea of contagious influenza to be abandoned entirely. He stated that when nine-tenths of the medical world agreed on the non-contagious nature of influenza, all controversy should cease. The proof, though not positive, was sufficiently presumptive.

The resistance to contagion rested on practical observation. Healthy people routinely failed to contract disease despite intimate contact with the sick. This happened in households, in hospitals, in workplaces. Healthcare workers—doctors, nurses, ambulance officers—had mortality rates lower than any other occupation during the Spanish flu pandemic, despite regular close contact with dying patients. If influenza spread through contagion, front-line workers should have been decimated.

The inconsistencies were not minor. They were systematic and pervasive.

9. The Overthrow

The first part of Louis Pasteur’s germ theory was published in 1861. This perspective undermined the validity of work weather doctors had undertaken. Supporters of contagion argued that influenza epidemics occurred independently of meteorological changes and that person-to-person transmission could explain disease spread.

Despite opposition from the medical elite, many weather doctors remained undeterred. They maintained that germ theory was not required to explain influenza’s cause and spread. They challenged whether germs could account for influenza appearing simultaneously across vast distances, affecting large numbers of people who had no direct contact with each other.

In 1885, Dr. Frederick Campbell wrote that if germ theories were rejected, the relationship between atmospheric changes and bodily disorders became more easily comprehended. He argued that physicians who pointed toward microbes without understanding environmental changes were doing only half their duty.

In 1899, Dr. George Poore lectured at a prominent London medical college, arguing that properly studying human diseases required looking not simply at man but at what occurred in nature, outside the human body. Poore believed nature was where medicine must look to solve the problem of infectious diseases, particularly epidemics.

The work of medical meteorologists was largely overshadowed by the advent of viruses at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet germ theory never fully dispelled meteorological accounts. Many doctors and scientists publicly contested Pasteur’s assertions. Germ theory seldom appeared in dictionaries, encyclopedias, or medical textbooks—particularly in the United States—until 1878, almost two decades after its inception.

The shift in consensus was not immediate or complete. It was gradual, reluctant, and left significant questions unresolved.

10. The Unresolved Legacy

Considerable evidence still demonstrates that changes in temperature and humidity significantly correlate with influenza activity, particularly in temperate climates. In these zones, winter air is typically cold and dry, with low absolute humidity and high relative humidity.

For hundreds of years, physicians have documented relationships between humidity levels and respiratory tract infections. Modern studies continue to find these correlations. Changes in relative humidity reliably predict outbreak timing. In temperate climates, people fall ill when air becomes cold and dry. In tropical climates, people fall ill when air becomes warm and wet. Accounting for this pattern through viruses proves difficult because viral contagiousness peaks during opposite conditions.

Low temperatures disrupt the body’s thermoregulatory ability and interfere with normal respiratory tract function. Some studies show a four-fold increase in sickness risk when exposed to cold. Controlled experiments demonstrate that cold air inhalation triggers inflammatory substances in airways—the same substances that increase thirty-fold during common colds and influenza. These substances are directly proportional to symptom severity.

Atmospheric compounds also appear to play a role. Ammonia and ozone at certain concentrations produce flu-like symptoms and harm respiratory tract function. A special committee established in 1874 by a leading medical association investigated relationships between atmospheric concentrations of these substances and respiratory illnesses like influenza.

Sir Christopher Andrewes, credited with discovering the influenza A virus, was perplexed by epidemiological peculiarities. He published an article in 1942 asking where the virus was between epidemics. In Britain, influenza appeared only every other year during January, February, and March. Andrewes wondered how the influenza virus could disappear for 21 out of 24 months. He found it difficult to imagine a virus spreading from place to place only to return to its point of origin. Even considering the southern hemisphere, he could not make this theory work. Three decades later, he attempted to answer the question again but only raised more unresolved issues.

The data weather doctors compiled about pace, scope, timing, and direction of epidemic spread remains unaddressed. The questions they raised about atmospheric causation were never answered—only displaced.

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