The climate of Calgary in the treatment of tuberculosis / by Ernest Wills.

  • Wills, Ernest.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The climate of Calgary in the treatment of tuberculosis / by Ernest Wills. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    THE CLIMATE OF CALGARY IN THE TREATMENT OF TUBERCULOSIS, BT • ? (l Ernest Wiles, MTD., M.R.C.P., Eng. Physician Superintendent to Calgary Sanatorium. The question of climate in the treatment of tuberculosis, pulmonary tuberculosis especially, is of widespread interest and at the same time the subject of such varied views that its consideration seems worthy of attention. Discussing first, the main principles of climate, both at sea level and higher altitudes, the bearing of these facts on the treatment of tuber- culosis in the Northwest, of which Calgary is the best district, will be considered, and will show the value of climate in this disease especially, as well as in others. The word climate or Greek “ klima ”, derived from the verb “klinein ” to slope or incline, was originally applied by the ancients to signify that obliquity of the earth’s surface with respect to the horizon, from which results the inequality of day and night. The early astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, about A.D., 140, divided the earth’s surface into a series of parallel climates, or zones, which differed from each other by the same movement in length, namely 15 minutes of the midsummer day. Again, Edrisi or Aldrisi, the most eminent of the Arabian geographers who flourished in the 12th century, in his magnum opus: “ The going out of a curious man to explore the regions of the globe, its provinces, islands, cities and their dimensions and situation.” divided the world into seven climates, commencing at the equinoctial line and extending northward to the limit at which the earth was supposed to be rendered uninhabitable by cold, each climate being subdivided by perpendicular lines into eleven equal parts, beginning with the West Coast of Africa, and ending with the East Coast of Asia. The author takes these sub- divisions one by one, from west to east, and south to north, and describes their characteristics. It may be easily seen that these climates would have different atmos- pheric conditions according to their 'situation, since the power of the sun’s rays, perpendicular to the earth at the equator, *becomes less to- wards the north as they become more oblique. And so when the division of the earth’s surface into climates was abandoned, for the more scientific partition by the lines of latitude and longitude, the term “climate” though remaining, had another significance, and denoted not the earth’s slope or inclination, but the atmospheric conditions of heat, moisture, winds, rain, clouds and electricity, the variations of which depend, to a certain extent,