Climates for invalids, or, A comparative enquiry as to the preventive and curative influence of the climate of Pau, and of Montpellier, Hyères, Nice, Rome, Pisa, Florence, Naples, Biarritz, etc., on health and disease ... / by Alexander Taylor.
- Alexander Taylor
- Date:
- 1866
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Climates for invalids, or, A comparative enquiry as to the preventive and curative influence of the climate of Pau, and of Montpellier, Hyères, Nice, Rome, Pisa, Florence, Naples, Biarritz, etc., on health and disease ... / by Alexander Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![sufficient to content oneself with merely noting the indi- cations afforded by the thermometer and barometer, to describe the nature of the soil, the state of humidity and dryness, and the prevailing winds. A knowledge of these facts go for much, certainly; but it is far from being the whole secret. We ought to endeavour to find out how all these, and other scarcely appreciable circum- stances combined, have influenced and continue to in- fluence the condition of the native population, physically and morally, in health and in disease. We ought to try to discover and to describe the causes of their exemption, if any, from those constitutional predispositions as well as diseases, which assail the natives of other countries, less favourably placed; and to ascertain, if possible, any peculiarity of action the climate may have upon the symptoms of existing diseases, and the character which these most generally assume ; for there can be no doubt, as a general fact, that diseases are invariably modified by climate to a very considerable extent. By this process, we may arrive at some useful deduc- tions, which may serve as rules for our decision : firstly, as to] the kind of predisposition to disease in strangers, whose development may be prevented by a timely re- course to the influence of the climate so tested; and, secondly, when actual disease has occurred, as to the quality of the symptoms invariably benefited, relieved, or aggravated. It is surely not too much to expect, that where, in any given climate, we find among the native population a marked absence of a scrofulous or lymphatic habit of body, and consequently the presence of a state unfavour- able to the deposition of tubercles in the lungs and else-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21452374_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
