The influence of climate in the prevention and cure of chronic diseases : more particularly of the chest and digestive organs: comprising an account of the principal places resorted to by invalids in England and the south of Europe ... With an appendix, containing a series of tables on climate / By James Clark.

  • Clark, James, Sir, 1788-1870.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of climate in the prevention and cure of chronic diseases : more particularly of the chest and digestive organs: comprising an account of the principal places resorted to by invalids in England and the south of Europe ... With an appendix, containing a series of tables on climate / By James Clark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    this no doubt still tends to maintain it; while the morbid sensibility of the nervous system once acquired is, doubtless, in some degree, transmitted from parent to child. But though much may depend on the effeminate and indolent manner of living at Rome, the climate, I believe, has some specific effect in inducing this state of the nervous system. The habits of the Romans differ little, I think, from those of the inhabitants of the other large towns in Italy, for instance, Naples, Florence, Genoa, &c. : and yet this morbidly sensitive state of the nervous system does not exist, by any means in the same degree, in these places. Even a temporary residence of some duration at Rome, produces a degree of the same morbid sensibility, and in cases where the Roman mode of living cannot be adduced as the cause. Something depends also, I believe, upon the moral education; though it must not be forgotten, that the sensibility of the nervous system in all warm climates is naturally more exalted than in the colder, and the influence of the passions far greater in producing and modi- fying bodily disease. This is particularly the case with the Romans; and, in tracing the causes of the chronic diseases of such of them as came within my observation, I was struck with the general re- ference of their origin to violent mental emotions. Another disease, or rather class of diseases, of much more serious character, but also of modern