It’s probably in the Air: Medical Meteorology in Denmark, 1810–1875

This article charts the rise and fall of medical meteorology in nineteenth-century Denmark, describing how interest in the subject developed, the optimism that sprang from the possibility of having access to accurate meteorological measurements, and the decline in interest as the data failed to support the medical meteorologists’ claims. Within this framework, I also attempt to place the Danish experience in a wider western context, and relate the fate of medical meteorology to other medical developments that were occurring at the same time. At the centre of this discussion are the qualified medical practitioners who acted as proponents of medical meteorology. One notable finding of this research was that medical meteorology has tended to be overlooked in general accounts of nineteenth-century medical science. The dominating narrative has been concerned with themes later labelled as “modern”. Contagionism and the sanitary movement have become synonymous with nineteenth-century medical science, with the result that other theories such as medical meteorology have tended to be ignored. A neighbouring field, medical geography, has received significant attention in recent years and does, in a wider context, include medical meteorology. Scholars have traced how the mapping of diseases became an important field of research in Germany and France from the 1850s, which resulted in visually powerful “noso-geographical” world