Int J Biometeorol DOI 10.1007/s00484-014-0888-3

ORIGINAL PAPER

Edwin Grant Dexter: an early researcher in human behavioral biometeorology Alan E. Stewart

Received: 3 March 2014 / Revised: 5 August 2014 / Accepted: 7 August 2014 # ISB 2014

Abstract Edwin Grant Dexter (1868–1938) was one of the first researchers to study empirically the effects of specific weather conditions on human behavior. Dexter (1904) published his findings in a book, Weather influences. The author’s purposes in this article were to (1) describe briefly Dexter’s professional life and examine the historical contexts and motivations that led Dexter to conduct some of the first empirical behavioral biometeorological studies of the time, (2) describe the methods Dexter used to examine weather-behavior relationships and briefly characterize the results that he reported in Weather influences, and (3) provide a historical analysis of Dexter’s work and assess its significance for human behavioral biometeorology. Dexter’s Weather influences, while demonstrating an exemplary approach to weather, health, and behavior relationships, came at the end of a long era of such studies, as health, social, and meteorological sciences were turning to different paradigms to advance their fields. For these reasons, Dexter’s approach and contributions may not have been fully recognized at the time and are, consequently, worthy of consideration by contemporary biometeorologists.

Biometeorology has a short history but a long past. Bouma (1987) and Tout (1987) credit Greek scholars, with their early interests, investigations, and writing, as laying the foundation for biometeorology. The contributions of Hippocrates (ca. 460–375 BC) were particularly noteworthy, especially as these involved the interactions of the four bodily humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) with the weather of different seasons. Ambient conditions were thought not only to affect internal organs and bodily health through the humors A. E. Stewart (*) University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

but also to interact with the humors to affect temperament, mood, and behavior (i.e., psychological functions in addition to the physiological ones (Arikha 2007)). The Persian philosopher, Avicenna (980–1037 AD), also adopted this humoral theory and related various medical and psychological outcomes to atmospheric phenomena (Avicenna 1970). This linkage of weather conditions and the enduring climates of places with human health and behavior make up the long past of biometeorology. The gradual emergence of meteorology in the USA in the nineteenth century further enabled efforts to relate changes in weather and the climates of places with human health. The Army Medical Department, with Dr. Samuel Forry working under the Surgeon General, Thomas Lawson, began in 1840 to establish a medical geography of the country, based on a growing number of weather observations and journal entries from different places, to ensure the safety and health of the US army troops (Fleming 1990). Disturnell (1867), in his book on the influence of the climate of North and South America, qualitatively related temperature and precipitation patterns to human life and activities. Osborne (1876) studied sensible temperature, relating it to temperature, humidity, and air movement. In addition, Osborne attempted to capture the human experience of sensible temperature with a range of verbal descriptors. Many people living in the vast rural areas of the USA in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to become skilled at reading the airs, waters, and places to determine their suitability for health and habitation (Valenčius 2002). In this era, air, water, and land were thought to carry essences that suffused living organisms with their properties and characteristics. Some of these airs, waters, and places were undesirable, for example, and involved low-lying, dark, moist locales with decaying organic matter that gave rise to miasmas, agues, or allergies—unhealthy properties that induced sickness or death. If people were trying to find suitable places to live

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and work, scientists and physicians of the nineteenth century documented the systematic correlations of environmental influences with conditions of the mind and body and sought to understand them (Janković 2006; Mittman 2007; Valenčius 2002). Beyond individual illnesses or discomforts, weather conditions and imperial political regimes sometimes interacted to result in widespread famine, illness, and death in Brazil, China, and India (Davis 2001). The late nineteenth century saw other efforts to relate the weather and climate to human events. Leffingwell (1892) qualitatively related seasons with behavior and the birth of children among unmarried persons. Growth of the business and industrial complex in America gave rise to efforts to understand its variability and cycles of mood among those in commercial enterprise. Jevons, in this regard, attempted to relate sunspot cycles to fluctuations in business—especially as sunspots affected weather patterns that subsequently affected crop yields from year to year (Anderson 2005; Peart 1996). It was within this historical context at the dawn of the Progressive Movement in America that Edwin Grant Dexter, perhaps one of the first human behavior biometeorologists, began to study the ways that specific weather conditions affected human behavior and psychological functioning (Mergen 2008). Dexter (1868–1938) was an educator and psychologist who completed one of the first systematic studies of the relationships between measured weather conditions and human behavioral functioning. The results of this work appeared first in Dexter’s dissertation from Columbia University in 1899, Conduct and the weather, and later in a more comprehensive form in his (1904) book, Weather influences. Although Dexter’s work continues to be cited in the scholarly literature of multiple fields because of its primacy and relevance, the significance of Dexter’s contributions to human biometeorology has not been examined previously. Dexter’s research is interesting not only for some of the findings that he reported but also because it illustrates the nature of early inquiry in human behavioral biometeorology and thus contributes to the historical context for our field. Dexter’s investigations also are significant and of interest because of the era in which he worked and what did and did not occur following the appearance of his work. Dexter completed his studies correlating individual weather variables with human behavior and functioning comparatively late in the long line of inquiry concerning the effects of weather, season, and climate upon people. While his research maintained a focus from the past upon the universal aspects of the weather that will have some effect upon everyone (Fleming et al. 2006), Dexter designed and completed his research as Abbe (1883, 1895, 1901) strived to establish meteorology as a recognized science embodying regular and standardized observations. The timing of Dexter’s interests in the psychological effects of weather also was fortuitous given that experimental psychology had been established in America in 1883

by Granville Stanley Hall whose first lab was at Johns Hopkins University. Shortly thereafter, James McKeen Cattell, under whose supervision Dexter took his Ph.D., opened his psychological laboratory at Columbia University. Dexter also benefitted from advancements in the statistical treatment of data that allowed him to go beyond compelling qualitative comparisons of variables that had been part and parcel of earlier work (Pearson 1900, 1923). Despite these events, Dexter’s work in the area of human behavioral biometeorology occurred at a time when science was looking beyond the establishment of correlations to discovering underlying causal mechanisms. It was no longer enough to establish that two variables were associated; instead, emphasis was increasingly on how one variable caused changes in another. Within medicine, for example, with the advent of germ theory and what this meant for the role of microscopic organisms in affecting human health, interest upon the contributions of broader environmental influences, like the weather, began to wane (Gaynes 2011). Similarly within meteorology, the early decades of the twentieth century saw increased research in attempts to understand storms (Fleming 1990), the physics of air and clouds (Whitnah 1961), and the growth of aviation and its need for weather information (Turner 2006). Such activities tended to foster within-discipline efforts to establish the scientific and applied basis of the field. The net effects of these developments meant that correlative work of Dexter, crossing the boundaries of several disciplines, was largely marginalized for decades. The manner and style of inquiry that Dexter embodied did not continue, or at the very least was interrupted, as the sciences focused upon new types of causes and new methods for advancing inquiry. The scholarly and professional climates became more hospitable for the kinds of work conveyed in Weather influences after the formal establishment of biometeorology as an interdisciplinary science in the 1950s. The author had three purposes writing this article, the first of which was to describe briefly Dexter’s professional life and to examine the factors that led to his studies of weather influences—what kind of person takes up such an interdisciplinary inquiry? The second purpose was to describe the methods Dexter used to examine weather-behavior relationships and briefly to characterize the results that he reported. The third purpose was to examine the historical context of Dexter’s research and to assess its significance. How did the scientific community view his research? In what ways did Dexter influence subsequent scholarship in the multiple fields that contribute to human biometeorology?

Who was Edwin Grant Dexter? Dexter was born in Calais, ME, on July 21, 1868, to Henry Vaughan Dexter and Mary Edna Boardman. Henry V. Dexter

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(1816–1884) was a Baptist Minister whose family emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1629 (Warden and Dexter 1905). Edwin was the youngest of six children, having three brothers and two sisters. The family had moved first from Calais, then to Kennebunkport, and finally to Templeton, MA, because the “climate did not seem to agree with him [Henry V. Dexter]” (Walton 1898, p. 16). Dexter attended Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then enrolled at Brown University in 1887 where he earned the Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1891 and a Master of Arts upon examination in 1892 (Brown University 1905). He worked as an instructor in applied mathematics and civil engineering at Brown from 1891 to 1892. From 1892 to 1895, Dexter was the science master of the Colorado Springs High School. Then, in 1895, Dexter received an appointment as professor of psychology at the Colorado State Normal School (CSNS) in Greeley (now the University of Northern Colorado), where he remained for the next 4 years. Dexter’s professional work at CSNS continued to involve the teaching of science, begun while at Brown, and also reflected his interests in human behavior. This is evidenced by a series of short pedagogical essays entitled “Psychological chats” that were published in the CSNS periodical, The Crucible, in late 1896 and early 1897 (e.g., Dexter 1896). Most of the essays concerned perceptual, cognitive, and learning processes that were discussed in relation to practical or pedagogical issues. This phase of Dexter’s education reveals his breadth of interests in topics that spanned from mathematics and civil engineering to education and psychology. Although such a broad education was not uncommon at the time Dexter studied, it does show how his training positioned him to study the influences of weather on people. In 1898, Dexter received a fellowship to attend Columbia University for doctoral study where his major subject was education and his minor areas were psychology and philosophy. Dexter attended Columbia during a very dynamic time in the history of that university. James McKeen Cattell, then editor of the journal Science, was directing the newly created psychology program at Columbia and was appointed as Head of the Department of Psychology, Philosophy, and Anthropology in 1898 (Barzun 1957). Cattell served as Dexter’s advisor. Cattell’s research in psychophysical processes and anthropometric assessment may have been especially appealing to Dexter given his interests in the ways that specific weather conditions affected behavior and psychological functioning (Cattell 1893a, b). Dexter brought some of the data he used for his dissertation from Denver. He also collected more data during the 1898– 1899 year while in New York. In addition to his coursework, Dexter used his time at Columbia to complete several studies of weather influences on psychological functioning. Dexter relied upon large samples of students, teachers, and police officers, upon vital statistics of crimes committed, suicides,

and hospital admissions, among other things, to complete these studies. In addition to the use of social data, Dexter also relied upon summaries of atmospheric conditions from the US Weather Bureau offices in New York and Denver to examine the contributions of particular meteorological variables to the phenomena he studied. This work culminated in Dexter’s 1899 dissertation, Conduct and the weather (Dexter 1899a). Dexter graduated in 1899 with a Ph.D. from Columbia’s Faculty of Philosophy and with a Higher Diploma in Education from Teacher’s College. Figure 1 shows Dexter shortly after his graduation from Columbia University. After a brief period of work at CSNS, Dexter accepted a position as professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the summer of 1900. In his first year at the University of Illinois, Dexter conveyed to Cattell his interests both in continuing his studies of weather influences and in collecting anthropometric and psychological performance data at Illinois using the instruments and questionnaire forms that Cattell had developed at Columbia. Dexter also corresponded with Cattell about getting additional manuscripts concerning weather, drunkenness, suicide, and the effects of calm weather into publication (Dexter 1900, 1901, 1902). Because Cattell edited Science, Popular Science Monthly, and The Scientific

Fig. 1 Edwin Grant Dexter in 1900. Image courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University Archives

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Monthly in addition to Psychological Review, Dexter was quite interested in what Cattell may have found useful for publication in one or more of these venues. It was during his early years at Illinois that Dexter compiled his dissertation and related weather studies into his 1904 book, Weather influences. Beyond the empirical studies that Dexter reported in Weather influences, surprisingly, he did not conduct any additional research on the psychological effects of weather, although he did review some of his earlier results in a later article (Dexter 1926). Dexter largely spent the remainder of his formal career working in educational administration, having been appointed as Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Because of his administrative skills and fluency in Spanish, Dexter received an appointment from the President of Panama to become Rector of the National Institute of Panama, the largest school in Panama City offering instruction to pupils from kindergarten through college (New York Times 1917). From 1918 to 1920, Dexter functioned as Chief of the Red Cross Bureau of War Orphans, working chiefly with children in and around Paris. Later in his Red Cross service, Dexter was the Chief of Operations in Montenegro and subsequently led medical relief missions to Ukraine (Dexter 1988). Dexter returned to the USA in 1920 and accepted a position with the War Department as an education specialist. In 1924, Dexter was reassigned to the Veterans Administration Headquarters in Washington, DC, where he worked as a special assistant to the VA administrator until his retirement and subsequent death in 1938.

Dexter’s weather influences Motivations There appear to have been at least two motivations for Dexter’s studies of weather influences on human behavior, the first of which was based upon his family experiences. It was noted previously that Dexter’s father moved the family from Calais, to Kennebunkport, Maine, and then to Templeton/Baldwinville, MA, due to the climate and its effect on the elder Dexter (Walton 1898). The weather’s influence on Henry Dexter must have been significant because Edwin dedicated Weather influences to his father, “whose susceptibility to weather influences first impressed me with their potency” (Dexter 1904, p. vii). The second motivation for writing Weather influences stemmed from Dexter’s work in education. In a 1926 reprise of his weather influence research that began in Colorado and before his doctoral studies at Columbia, Dexter described how teachers in Colorado posed the question to him of why particular kinds of weather seemed to create discipline problems for their students (Dexter 1926, p. 322): Some years ago in the course of a discussion of school discipline with a group of teachers, one of them asked

me why it was that during some kinds of weather the children “cut up” so. That I thought was an easy one and blandly proceeded to pass on to something of real importance after having mentioned rainy day, lack of exercise, windows shut, etc., etc., with the air of one who feels that he has been unnecessarily interrupted. But it wouldn’t do at all. They set upon me in a body….As a result, the question of weather influences has been a kind of knitting work with me ever since; not climatebut weather, pure and simple: those day-to-day fluctuations in meteorological conditions which we all know so well. It is true that if any one of them becomes chronic as heat or cold-it constitutes climate; but that was not what interested me. Whole libraries had been written on climatic effects, but who had ever said anything about those of the weather? The era of Progressivism in which Dexter began his studies also may have helped to crystalize and heighten his motivations.1 Two aspects of Progressivism may have been particularly salient for Dexter, the first of which involved the application of social science data and scientific expertise to inform public policy and administration (Hofstadter 1963). Attempts both to understand and represent the experiences of the middle class, especially with emerging insights from the young social sciences of psychology and sociology, were particularly consistent with Progressivism and provided counter-narratives to those of the ruling elites and bosses of the time. Second and, more specifically, the Progressive emphasis on mandatory education to create an informed and disciplined middle class of young adults may have given rise to efforts to understand and control students’ behaviors in the classroom (McGerr 2005). Ahead of the Progressive era, children largely pursued the occupations and lifestyles of their parents. As successive cohorts of students brought the outside of their agrarian or industrial lives into the classroom, it makes sense that one of the Dexter’s central motivations was to understand weather influences upon school attendance and classroom comportment. Dexter began addressing these questions by consulting folklore sources on the influence of weather on plants, animals, 1 Although nothing exists in Dexter’s writing or in his personal correspondences from the University of Illinois that directly reveals his political sentiments, the review of his life and work in this article suggests that Dexter was a Progressive. Dexter came of age and launched his career at the height of the Progressive era in America (1870 to 1920, according to McGerr 2005). The nature of his work, which involved gathering of both physical and social science data to understand and inform education, government, and commerce also is consistent with the Progressive mindset. Dexter’s son, E.B. Dexter (1988, p. 1) wrote that, “Father was Dean of the School of Education and at age 38 was one of the leading progressive educators in America.” Finally, Dexter’s appointment to the University of Puerto Rico by Theodore Roosevelt and his long history of public service in education, the Red Cross, and the Veterans Administration convey both his humanitarian and Progressive commitments.

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and humans. Undoubtedly, some of what made it into popular sayings and beliefs about the weather in the late nineteenth century stemmed from peoples’ attempts to find suitable places, waters, and air for their life and work (Janković 2000; Meyer 2000; Sargent 1982; Valenčius 2002). Dexter also examined the ways in which weather influences were conveyed in literary works. In this regard, a significant portion of his dissertation and the first 54 pages of Weather influences were devoted to a description and synthesis of such folklore and literature in the English language. This examination appears to have served two purposes, the first of which was to legitimize inquiries about the scope of the weather’s influence on people, animals, and plants. Because others had pondered such questions and speculated about the nature of weather influences in folklore and literature long into the past, this seemed to justify the inquiry for Dexter. Second, such a review made it clear to Dexter that no empirically based studies of specific weather influences upon human behavior had been undertaken. That is, the weather influences cited in folklore and literature had not been subjected to empirical examination. Given the development of large-sample statistical tests that were beginning to emerge as Dexter prepared his manuscript, conducting empirical studies of weather influences using the new methodology may have appeared as a logical next-step. Populations and variables studied Weather influences is a compendium of several empirical studies that Dexter completed in Colorado and New York as part of his dissertation as well as several other studies that he performed before and during his years at Columbia University.2 Dexter published these studies as several articles in both professional journals and popular periodicals. An examination of these articles and of Dexter’s studies revealed that he often published several articles using the same data set to reach a range of different popular readers or scholarly audiences (e.g., Dexter 1899b; Dexter 1902). Table 1 shows the behavioral and meteorological variables that Dexter studied and summarized in Weather influences. The rows correspond to the behavioral variables that Dexter thought might be influenced by ambient weather conditions. An inspection of these variables suggests that some of them consist of vital statistics (i.e., death, suicide, and crime rates). Others variables such as hospitalizations for physical or mental health reasons related to prevalence rates of conditions that Dexter suspected that the weather might affect. Dexter 2 The choices to study weather influences in Denver and New York appeared to be based primarily on practical considerations given Dexter’s work at Colorado State Normal School, followed by his 2-year stay in New York while completing his doctoral studies with Cattell. It was somewhat fortuitous for Dexter that the climates and geography (i.e., elevation, proximity to the ocean) for Denver and New York were different and thus added variability to meteorological parameters Dexter investigated. Given the scope and size of the variables Dexter examined, it seems obvious that the research in Weather influences was started well before Dexter began pursuing his doctoral studies at Columbia University.

examined the attendance and behavior at schools in Denver and New York City because, as noted above, teachers anecdotally reported that changes in children’s behavior appeared to be related to changes in the weather. Finally, bank tellers’ error rates and performance on the discrimination task represent Dexter’s examination of weather influences on perceptual and cognitive processing. Although the measurement of these variables may be somewhat basic when compared to contemporary standards, they rather clearly reveal the behavioral biometeorological scope of Dexter’s research. The columns of Table 1 list the meteorological variables that functioned as separate independent variables in the weather influence analyses that Dexter performed. Dexter described the measurement of these variables and his analysis of them for his research in Chap. VI, “The meteorological conditions.” To represent the weather for each day, Dexter used the mean of the hourly observed values for most of the measured variables (i.e., temperature, relative humidity, and barometric pressure) taken from the Denver and New York City stations of the US Weather Bureau. For wind, Dexter relied upon the total miles of wind that passed the station each day; this provided an indication of the amount of air (or windiness) that moved over a location each day. If 0.01″ of liquid or frozen precipitation fell, then the day was counted as one in which there was precipitation. The “character of the day” was a measure of the cloudiness and sunshine and was assessed with a sunshine recording sensor. Data analyses Dexter used a descriptive quantitative approach for exploring the influence of individual weather variables on the human behavior variables listed in Table 1. This methodology was consistent with the data analytic approaches that were emerging at the time (Smith et al. 2000). For temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind movement, Dexter chose a given interval (e.g., 5 °F for temperature) and constructed relative frequency tables for the values in each interval over the period of days contained within the span of time each variable was examined. For example, Dexter reported that for New York City, of the 2,557 days of the 7 years considered, 28 (1.1 %) of such days had mean temperatures between 15 and 20 °F. Dexter then plotted of the relative frequency for each interval of the given meteorological variable and referred to this as the expectancy curve for that variable; Dexter plotted the expected values as horizontal straight lines in his figures. Figure 2 is a reproduction of Dexter’s original figure for this analysis and shows relationship of temperature with assaults committed separately by gender. Such graphs provided very useful visual information for communicating the nature and magnitude of the relationships of particular weather with the behavior variables. The reliance upon such analytical methods and means for communicating relationships were very typical of the research approaches available around the turn of the century (Smith et al. 2000, 2002).

Int J Biometeorol Table 1 Meteorological and behavioral variables examined in Weather influences Meteorological variables Behavioral variables

Number

Temperature (°F)

Relative humidity (%)

Barometric pressure. (inches)

Wind (mi)

Precipitation (yes/no)

Cloud cover

1. Attendance in selected NY public schools (1895–1896) 2. Child deportment in NY public schools— number of demerits (1895–1896) 3. Child deportment in Denver public schools—number of demerits (1882–1896) 4. Assault and Battery in New York City (1891–1897)

108,020

Higher (warm)

NP

Lower

None

Clear

14,083

Lower at extremes Higher at extremes

Lower

Lower at extremes Lower

Lower at extremes Higher

None

Clear

None

Clear

5. Murders in Denver (1884–1896) 6. Discipline in New York City Penitentiary—number of discipline problems (1891–1897) 7. Arrests for insanity in New York City (1891–1897) 8. Persons receiving outpatient treatment at Roosevelt Hospital, New York City (1893–94) 9. New York City police officers who were off duty due to sickness for one day (1891–1895) 10. Deaths in New York City (1886–87) 11. Suicides in New York City (1882–87) 12. Suicides in Denver (1884–1897) 13. Arrests for Drunkenness in New York City (1893–95) 14. Clerical Errors discovered in records of national banks in New York City (1896–97) 15. A study in discrimination carried out at the Psychology Laboratory of Columbia University (Time to make discrimination)

Lower

Higher at extremes

39,761

Higher(warm)

Lower

Lower

Lower at extremes

None

184 3,981

Higher (warm) Higher (warm)

Lower Lower

Lower Lower

Higher Lower at extremes

Rain None

Fair and partly cloudy Cloudy Fair

3,564

Higher (warm)

Lower

Lower

NP

None

Fair

75,486

NP

Higher

Lower

Lower

Rain

Cloudy

191,137

Lower (cold)

NP

Lower

Higher

NP

Cloudy

74,793

Higher (hot)

Higher

ND

Rain

Cloudy

2,946 260 44,495

NP Warmer Lower (cold)

Higher Lower Higher

Lower Lower NP

Higher at extremes Higher Higher Higher

None None NP

Clear Clear NP

3,698

Higher (hot)

Higher at extremes

Higher

Lower

Rain

Cloudy

50

Higher

NP

Higher

NP

Rain

Cloudy

Table entries convey the range of meteorological variable where the behavioral variables deviated from expectation. For example, regarding attendance in NY schools (first row), attendance exceeded expectation when the temperature was higher (or warm). Similarly (first row), attendance was lower at extremes of barometric pressure, when there was less wind, clear skies, and no precipitationNP means no pattern was observed. NP no pattern was observed, ND not determined

To examine the relationship of the behavioral variable with weather, Dexter tabled the occurrence of each variable (e.g., assaults) according to the meteorological parameter under consideration and again determined the relative frequency of the occurrence within each interval. Continuing with the example of temperature, Dexter observed that 36,627 assaults occurred over the 2,557 days from 1891 to 1897. Two-hundred eighty-eight (288) of these assaults (about .79 %) occurred when the mean temperature of the day was between 15 and 20 °F. The plot of all such relative frequencies for the range of the meteorological variable was referred to as the occurrence curve for that variable. For each meteorological variable, Dexter differenced the expectancy and occurrence values to ascertain whether the behavioral

or psychological variable under analysis was more or less likely to occur under the given weather conditions. Dexter plotted the occurrence curves as deviations above or below the horizontal lines representing the expectancy values. For assaults at lower temperatures (15 to 20 °F), for example, the occurrence of assaults was .79 % and the expectancy was 1.1 %; the occurrence was approximately 28 % less than the expectancy (see Fig. 1). Dexter would interpret such intervals as indicating a decreased likelihood of assaults occurring at lower temperatures “if the temperature exerted no influence” (Dexter 1904, p. 69). The analyses and interpretations of the other meteorological and behavioral variables were all conducted similarly.

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Fig. 2 Reproduction of Fig. 13 from Weather influences (p. 146) showing the relationship between temperature and arrests for assault and battery for men and women. The units on the horizontal axis represent

5 °F categories of temperature, and the units on the vertical axis represent the percentage of deviation of the observed plots for men and women relative to the expectancy (heavy midline labeled 0 %)

Although Dexter used large samples to study the influence of the weather, his methods were ultimately descriptive and not inferential insofar as he provided interpretations of the results he observed and conjectured the possible reasons for ways in which the weather could exert its apparent influences. Dexter’s methods approximated the goodness-of-fit tests that Pearson (1900, 1923) developed and published after Dexter’s work was completed.

Similarly, a lower barometric pressure was associated with a number of behavioral variables that Dexter studied. He summarized these findings and offered an interpretation about the effects of pressure on mental tasks (p. 253):

Dexter’s findings and interpretations The cells in Table 1 provide a synopsis of Dexter’s findings of weather influences on human behavior3. A few overall trends emerged in his analyses, one of which concerned temperature. Dexter observed (pp. 250–251): …we have two opposite effects from heat: first, upon sickness and drunkenness, which vary inversely as the temperature; and second upon crime and insanity, which vary directly with it. Between these two we have the classes of data which are studied for indoor conditions (death, deportment in the schools and penitentiary, errors in banks) and which would not feel the full force of temperatures as registered by the Weather Bureau, though they all show a marked influence from extreme heat; and lastly, suicide, which shows peculiarities all its own, though none the less interesting. 3 The author compiled Table 1 based upon the results that Dexter reported in Chaps. VII–XIII; no such table appears in Dexter’s original work. The purpose of reporting Dexter’s results in Table 1 and in the narrative of this article is to describe his analytic methods and to characterize his work within the history of biometeorology.

Atmospheric conditions which are registered by a low barometer are productive of the various manifestations of active disorder tabulated under the heads, crime, deportment, and insanity. Sickness also seems to be increased by the same condition, while suicide is very excessive during atmospheric pressure somewhat below the normal. On the other hand, drunkenness is less prevalent under such conditions; and attention, as indicated by perfection of mental computations, is either more perfect, or greater precaution is taken to guard against error. Beyond temperature and atmospheric pressure, there was little consistency observed across the behavioral outcomes for the other meteorological variables. Often, though, Dexter did note a number of trends in the influence of weather on behavior and often speculated about the nature of the relationship. Dexter’s final chapter in Weather influences represented an effort to describe the individual contributions of weather variables on behavioral variables and vital statistics and to synthesize a descriptive theory of weather and behavior relationships. Perhaps the most central of Dexter’s conclusions was, “The quality of the emotional state is plainly influenced by the weather states” (Dexter 1904, p. 272). In making this statement, he was not only echoing what was reported previously in weather literature and lore but also able to substantiate the

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conclusions with his data. Dexter’s analyses of the association of weather conditions with behavior in schools and prisons, suicide, murder, and assault rates, and arrests for insanity clearly implicated emotion, motivation, and impulse control processes. Dexter used these behavioral variables as proxies for emotion because no assessment instruments existed in his day for these psychological variables.

Significance of weather influences It is possible to assess the effects and impacts of Dexter’s research on the emerging field of behavioral biometeorology in several ways, beginning at a general level with how other scholars of the day reviewed Weather influences. Another indicator of Dexter’s influences exists in the specific ways in which he affected the work of other scholars and in certain topical areas. Finally, the significance of Weather influences stems from the historical context within which it was situated. Dexter’s work appeared at the end of a long era of inquiry that focused heavily upon the contributions of the environment to human physical and mental functioning. Book reviews At least six reviews of Weather influences appeared in 1904–1905 (Brewster 1905; Browne 1904; Dewey 1905; Lockyer 1905; Mill 1904; Shrady and Stedman 1905)4. The reviewers provided largely positive evaluations of Dexter’s approach and generally recommended the book as a worthy contribution. The reviewers were uniformly supportive of Dexter’s quantitative approach in studying the effects of weather on behavior because his efforts went beyond the interesting and compelling but empirically undocumented corpus of weather influences reported in popular folklore and other literature. Writing in Nature, Lockyer (1905, p. 147) stated, “The problem as affecting the behaviour of humanity in the mass has, however, received but scant attention hitherto. The statistical method affords the means of obtaining numerical 4

Who were the people who provided reviews of Conduct and the weather and, later, Weather influences? Francis F. Browne was a poet, critic, and editor who lived in Chicago. He was the editor of The Dial from 1880 to 1913, which was a literary review of modernist literature. Willis A. Dewey was a homeopathic physician from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was the editor and proprietor of The Medical Century journal. Norman Lockyer was an astronomer and was the founder and first editor of the journal Nature. Lockyer and French chemist Pierre Janssen discovered helium. Hugh R. Mill was a Scottish geographer and meteorologist. He was interested in the establishment of meteorology as a science. William E. Plummer was the director of the Liverpool Observatory and a reader in astronomy at Liverpool University. Plummer increased work in meteorology at the observatory and passed along information that he collected to local officials. George F. Shrady was a practicing physician from New York. Shrady founded and edited the journal Medical Record in 1866. Thomas L. Stedman was a New York practicing physician with an interest in geography who coedited the Medical Record with George Shrady.

results which enable us to estimate the importance of such effects….The number of data is in some cases extremely large (about 40,000 cases of assault), and there can be no doubt about the genuineness of the effects of meteorological changes.” Some reviewers were more critical in their evaluations of Dexter’s interpretations and conclusions. In this regard, Lockyer (1905, p. 147) mentioned the possibility of confounding variables in the relationships between weather and behavior: “The interpretation of the results is, however, a matter of considerable difficulty, and the possible influence of other than meteorological causes has to be steadily borne in mind.” Shrady and Stedman (1905, p. 71) noted the limitations in some of Dexter’s conclusions because conditions of illumination (sunshine or artificial light) were not more fully examined. Other concerns were expressed about Dexter’s constructs of available energy and emotional state in the descriptive theory he developed from his data, especially as these were thought at the time to be determined by latitude (e.g., Huntington 1915). Specific influences Researchers have regularly cited Weather influences from fields that primarily encompassed biometeorology and health, geography, psychology, sociology, and criminology5. Dexter’s work appears to have influenced at least two significant lines of scholarship that focused upon 5 The author performed a citation analysis to identify and characterize the sources that cited Conduct and the weather and Weather influences. There were two purposes for the citation analysis, the first of which was to document that since the publication of Weather influences in 1904, researchers and writers have continued to cite Dexter’s work and have found regular uses for it. Second, the results of this citation analysis may provide a rough comparative context for other researchers who are interested in documenting the relative influences of early twentieth century writers. Unlike contemporary citation analyses or assessments of impact, the publication of Weather influences occurred at a time when information was disseminated and incorporated much more slowly. In addition, for such an early publication date, there are no comprehensive sources to consult in assessing subsequent citations to Weather influences. Thus, the following sources were consulted: PsycINFO, Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, MEDLINE, JSTOR, the Reader’s Guide Retrospective Index, Google Scholar, and Google Books to identify as many sources as possible. From 1899 to 2010, the literature search yielded 74 citations to Conduct and the weather (38 books or book chapters and 36 journal articles) and 228 citations to Weather influences (156 books or book chapters and 72 journal articles). Few authors cited both works as the final lists of citations that contained only 12 entries in common (16 % of Conduct and the weather and 5 % of Weather influences). Approximately 84 % of the citations involved the subjects of criminology (19.7 %), psychology (16.6 %), sociology (16.2 %), biometeorology/health (14.0 %), geography (7.9 %), meteorology/climatology (4.8 %), and education (4.4 %). The citations to Weather influences were the highest in the four decades following its publication. From the decade to 1960 to the present time, there have been approximately 15 citations per decade to Weather influences. From 2010 to the present time, there are one or two citations per year to the book, on average. Although these quantities are very modest or even underwhelming by contemporary standards, the data do attest to the early importance of Weather influences and the conceptual or historical value that present-day researchers find in Dexter’s writing.

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weather-behavior relationships. First, the human geographer Ellsworth Huntington significantly incorporated some of Dexter’s results and his theory of vital nerve energies (Weather influences, Chap. XV) in describing the effects of weather upon the behavioral traits of people in Asia (Huntington 1907, pp. 364–365): Dexter, in his book on “Weather Influences,” has made a careful study of the influence of various meteorological conditions upon the conduct of school children, upon the occurrence of crime, and upon the number of errors made by bank clerks…His results confirm the popular belief in the highly invigorating influence of clear, cool weather. They show, however, that although in damp, muggy weather people feel disagreeable and suppose themselves ready to do all sorts of evil things, as a matter of fact, they do not do them. The vital functions are depressed so far that there is no surplus energy to spend in doing anything very active, either good or bad….Dry weather, on the contrary, stimulates the vital processes, unless it be exceptionally warm, and creates a surplus of energy….On very dry days…[t]he nerves, according to Dexter, become unstrung by reason of of the high state of electric or magnetic tension induces in the air by the dryness of wind…So after all, perhaps it is “a matter of climate.” Dexter was the only source on weather effects that Huntington cited in his chapter on “The geographic basis of history” from which the above quotation was excerpted. Thus, given the interest in the influences of weather and climate on the characteristics of people, nations, and civilizations that had been developing in this era (e.g., Disturnell 1867; Montesquieu 1900), Dexter’s work may have appeared promising to Huntington because of its empirical basis, its focus on specific weather conditions, and the psychological theory that Dexter offered as an explanation for his findings6. 6

Although Huntington cited Dexter’s work, no record could be found in the archives of Huntington or Dexter that the two men ever corresponded with each other. Huntington was a prolific writer who was given to creating big ideas and sweeping theories that, upon closer examination, were found lacking in the careful thought or empirical rigor that was needed to support them. This style of scholarship was one of the reasons for Huntington’s stormy on-and-off relationship with Yale University (Fleming 1998). In this context, it is easy to see how Huntington may have appropriated Weather influences as support for his much stronger climatic determinism. In his 1926 review of his work on Weather influences, Dexter spoke of effects of weather on people and seemed to distance himself from a study of climatic effects. Similarly, within the book itself, Dexter never used the verb “determined” or “determines” in connection with weather-behavior relationships, although he frequently used “influenced” and “influences” to characterize weather-behavior relationships. Such terminology suggests a much softer and far less deterministic position than that adopted by Huntington.

The significance of Weather influences to Huntington also was reflected in his later book Civilization and climate (1915). In this book, Huntington based his work about the ideal climate under which the various activities of human civilization could occur. Whereas Dexter described psychological and behavioral outcomes associated with specific weather conditions, Huntington went beyond such description and created a generalized conception of ideal climatic conditions that, when present or absent, was believed to exert significant effects on the histories of civilizations (Boia 2005). Dexter appears to have been the principal inspiration for the relatively strong climatic determinism embodied in Huntington’s position because Huntington did not cite other sources for weather-behavior relationships (Boia 2005). Hellpach (1911), who also cited Dexter, took a similarly broad approach in attempting to link the temperaments of cultures and nations with the climates of their geographic regions in his book, Geopsyche (Stehr 1996). A second and lasting legacy of Weather influences appears in the criminology literature. Specifically, Dexter’s empirical observations of greater behavioral problems in school and higher arrest rates for conflict and assault during times of warmer weather have remained of interest to researchers in criminology since the book’s publication. Since 1990, eight journal articles have been published that investigated the relationships of weather with aggressive, violent, or otherwise criminal behavior (Cheatwood 1995; Cohn 1990a, b, 1993, 1996; Cohn and Rotton 1997; LeBeau and Corcoran 1990; Rotton and Cohn 2000). These articles were cited by a total of 137 additional publications. Conduct and the weather or Weather influences was either the earliest (by date) citation in the reference list for each of these papers or was the earliest empirical source that treated weather and behavior relationships in the reference lists. A large proportion of the authors in the articles also mentioned or discussed Dexter as the first researcher to move beyond either conceptual or limited (seasonal) analyses of criminal behavior to undertake a fuller empirical examination of specific weather conditions and criminal behavior. Studies examining the effects of temperature and other variables upon criminal behavior and interpersonal violence have appeared regularly in the International Journal of Biometeorology (Auliciems and DiBartolo 1995; Höppe 1997). In this regard, Weather influences has functioned as a classic reference for contemporary research in weather and criminology. Significance of weather influences in historical context Another reason that Dexter’s work was important comes from the wider historical context in which his research can be situated. Weather influences appeared at the end of an era in which the environment was seen as a powerful influence on

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individual and collective functioning. This effort extended far into the past, perhaps beginning in the work of Hippocrates. The histories of medicine, politics, geography, and the military include researchers who inquired about the roles of climate, seasons, weather, places, airs, and waters in affecting human health and functioning (Fleming 1990; Fleming et al. 2006; Sargent 1982; Strauss and Orlove 2003; Valenčius 2002). Especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as America was settled, the predominant view was that the health and experiences of people were strongly affected by the qualities of the environments that they inhabited. Thus, the use of careful anecdotal observations or, where available, numerical data helped to illuminate how peoples’ health and functioning were related to their surroundings. Understanding these person-place-atmosphere relationships was important for establishing agriculture, commerce, transportation, and places to inhabit. In this regard, Dexter was an early twentieth century correlator who was, at the time, among the most recent to study weather, health, and behavior. Further, he used some of the most current research methods of the day to complete his research. The two aspects made Dexter’s inquiry novel, the first of which was his focus on psychological states (suicidality), behaviors (drunkenness), and cognitive performance (bank tellers’ errors). Dexter emphasized these variables more than previous researchers did. Second, a technical novelty of Dexter’s approach, and one that was lauded by those who reviewed his work, was his focus on empirical data and the use of the latest methods of statistical analysis in this time to study weather influences (Smith et al. 2000, 2002). Dexter’s approach to his research paralleled a similar emerging emphasis within meteorology at the time and may have been, among other factors, responsible for attracting the attention of Cleveland Abbe. Cleveland Abbe, who worked as the first meteorologist in what became the US Weather Bureau from 1871 to 1916, devoted his career to a data-driven, deterministic approach to weather forecasting in this era (Abbe 1895, 1901). Beyond a local reading of weather variables and the use of climatology to foretell the weather, Abbe strived to develop weather forecasting based upon a large-scale, synoptic understanding of weather as measured with standardized instruments. Similarly, Dexter desired to move beyond weather proverbs and impressionistic methods of assessing the impacts of weather upon people in examining relationships between daily meteorological data and the behavioral data he gathered. In this regard, Dexter appears to have succeeded. Abbe wrote a 21page introduction for Weather influences and noted the strengths of Dexter’s methodology and its accomplishments

in bringing a fresh perspective to the study of humans and the weather (p. 9)7. The work on Weather Influences that Professor Dexter now offers to the attention of the public relates to a theme that has been discussed pro and con by many philosophers. The definitive conclusions attained by him in regard to the influence of certain specific weather conditions upon men are but the beginning of a long series of special researches that will afford a scientific foundation for the general belief in the influences of climate upon characteristics of tribes and nations. Within this introduction, Abbe also criticized earlier work by Disturnell (1867) and Montesquieu (1900) that related differences in character or behavioral dispositions to slight differences in climate. Abbe believed that these approaches

7 How did Cleveland Abbe come to write the forward to Weather influences? No record of correspondences between Dexter and Abbe could be found in the archives of either person. Cleveland Abbe, however, regularly corresponded with Dexter’s advisor at Columbia University, James McKeen Cattell. As the first person to hold a scientist and professor position with the US Weather Bureau, Abbe was very much interested in developing and promoting the new science of meteorology in the USA and Europe (Abbe 1895). Abbe also was interested in the educational preparation of university students for work in the new field. Because Cattell was the editor of Science and two other widely read scientific journals of the time, Abbe was very much interested in publicizing the science and training associated with meteorology. For example, Abbe (1894) wrote to Cattell: “As I have been particularly interested in maintaining the dignity and importance of one of the new branches of scientific work I am rather disappointed to find that you have not yet recognized it as yet in the list of sciences specified in your editorial committee. I am myself especially devoted to the success of the American Meteorological Journal and our Monthly Weather Review as representing a special science; but am not insensible to the value of a general journal that shall give us in a few words early notice of interesting discoveries and investigations….I shall take pleasure in communicating to “Science” a short article on the needs of meteorology.” Abbe (1900) expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Cattell nearly six years later: “SCIENCE has certainly exerted a widely increasing and excellent influence as an institution for the advancement of science and the dissemination of an intelligent interest in all branches of knowledge. We desire to cooperate as heartily as possible with you in the cultivation of meteorology and cognate subjects.” Thus, is it both likely and very understandable that Cattell could have brokered Abbe’s contribution to Weather influences. Abbe knew of Dexter’s (1899a, b) work because Dexter (1899b, 1903) published a synopsis of his dissertation in Abbe’s Monthly Weather Review and also published a corresponding article in the same forum just ahead of the release of Weather influences. Moreover, Abbe (1883), like Dexter, was interested in the effects of air temperature and humidity upon human activities and the experiences of these variables as “exhilarating” or “depressing.” By way of coincidences, Truman Abbe, the second eldest son of Cleveland, finished his medical studies at Columbia and graduated at the same ceremony as Dexter in 1899. The names of both students are listed on the graduation program for Columbia that year.

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were too broad and relied too much upon impressionistic data (p. 14): Montesquieu enunciate[d] a generalization to the effect that inhabitants of cold countries have but little taste for delicate pleasures; in temperate countries they have more; in warm countries the sensibility is exquisite…If we extend this comparison and include under one average all the people living north of the annual isotherm of 50 ° F. in the northern hemisphere, and those south of the same isotherm in the southern hemisphere, we shall at once perceive that we have included races that enjoy such great varieties of climate that possess such varied temperaments that we are taking heterogeneous averages that can have but little meaning. Similarly, although others such as Leffingwell (1892) and Quetelet (1838) explored variations in behavior with changes in season and climate, their approaches were largely qualitative in nature and did not focus on the definite, specific meteorological conditions in the manner of Dexter. Beyond the perspectives of Abbe, several sources, spanning a wide time interval since the book’s publication, asserted that Dexter was the first researcher to empirically investigate the role of weather upon human behavior (Bethel 1925; Diserens and Vaughn 1931; Driscoll and Stillman 2002; Mergen 2008; Moos 1976). Thus, Dexter’s methods of research may have helped to establish, at least in part, his contributions to early human behavioral biometeorology. What makes Dexter’s work historically noteworthy, perhaps more so than his empirical approach to correlating weather with behavior, is what did not happen following the publication of Weather influences. Specifically, inquiry that examined the contributions of the physical environment to human health and behavior came to a close and was not pursued again, at least in the context of weather and climate until the formal establishment of biometeorology in the 1950s. Just as Dexter and Abbe wanted to advance their respective disciplines, others working in sociology, health, and medicine sought similar theoretical and methodological routes to further their sciences. For some disciplines, this involved a focus upon more proximal, causal mechanisms compared to distal and environmentally encompassing ones. Scientists and practitioners in biology and medicine, for example, focused more on the germ theory of disease that came from the work of Pasteur, Bassi, and Henle; this approach garnered progressively more interest in the late nineteenth century (Gaynes 2011). Koch’s research in bacteriology had a similar effect of focusing attention on specific microscopic agents as causes of pathological conditions in people compared to the miasmas that existed within places and that generally were thought responsible for the development of fevers, agues, and other assorted ailments in people and animals (Gaynes 2011).

Although the macroscopic environment was (and still is) a potent contributor to some ailments, the discovery of possible causes within the microscopic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that attributes of the environment, such as weather and climate, were of less interest to researchers. A similar change in focus away from the environmental influences occurred within sociology as that field advanced. Scholars in sociology typically made passing or acknowledging reference to Dexter and the work of other scholars from the environment or geographical schools en route to developing sociological theories about the variables that Dexter and others studied (e.g., crime, insanity, suicide, etc.). Sociologists typically eschewed the descriptivism of Dexter and others such as Huntington (1915), who in his Civilization and climate wrote about covariation of physical environmental variables with broad behavioral and societal outcomes without undertaking a more substantial treatment of direct and indirect sociological influences (Fleming 1998; Klausner 1970; Stark 1970). The critique of Dexter and others appearing in Sorokin’s (1928, p. 193) Contemporary sociological theories is illustrative of this position: We must credit the [geographical] school with many interesting and suggestive theories; and with several correlations, which are, at least, partly true….This does not however, oblige us to accept its fallacious theories, its fictitious correlations, or finally, its overestimation of the role of geographical environment. We must separate the wheat from the chaff. After this “sifting” is made the remainder enters the storehouse of sociological principles. Thus, the study of individual and collective behavior began to emphasize the causal roles of relationships, the dynamics of groups, and the social climates of places rather than the contributions of the natural environment or the physical climate. As was the case with advances in health and medicine, these shifts in social science paradigms were occurring in the era in which Weather influences appeared and were responsible, in part, for the relative lack of interest in continuing the line of research that Dexter pursued. Meteorology provided a hospitable and encouraging reception for Weather influences, evidenced by Abbe’s involvement in the book. The study of meteorological influences on human health and behavioral functioning along with the related views of weather as local properties of places, however, waned significantly with time (Janković 2000; Valenčius 2002). The emergence of commercial aviation alone, with its needs for detailed and widespread meteorological products, occupied a significant and unique developmental epoch in the history of meteorology in the last century (Turner 2006). The sheer encompassing nature of meteorological science

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(i.e., involving physics, chemistry, mathematics), the efforts to establish reliable and consistent observing networks, and the burgeoning emphasis on weather prediction to serve a variety of applied needs and commercial purposes in the early 1900s (Pietruska 2011) meant that Dexter’s work would remain at the margins until the emergence of human biometeorology in the 1950s (Fleming 1990; Pietruska 2011; Whitnah 1961). In summary, Dexter’s work punctuated a long line of inquiry concerning the effects of the atmospheric environment upon humans. Although Weather influences was well done, the work was nonetheless descriptive and correlational and appeared in an era when the fields that it encompassed (health, medicine, sociology, psychology) were moving away from distal, environmental conceptions of causality. In this respect, Weather influences appeared perhaps too late to be fully recognized for the methods and findings that it contributed. Thus, Dexter’s work is valuable for contemporary biometeorologists first as a historical exemplar of weatherbehavior research and second as a one source from which human biometeorology emerged and continues today, especially in its human behavioral aspects.

Conclusions The author has presented a brief depiction of the life, work, and professional contributions of one of the first researchers to undertake an empirical study of weather and human behavior relationships. Edwin Grant Dexter brought both personal and professional motivations to his research at a time when reliable meteorological and vital statistical data were available and new statistical techniques also were emerging. Although Dexter’s results and the theory he developed to explain his findings may fall far short by contemporary scientific standards, the scholars of Dexter’s time and thereafter found his inquiries to be sufficiently novel and well-done to hold some promise advancing the field of weather and human behavior studies. Beyond this historical examination and assessment, the author has planned subsequent empirical work with the data that Dexter presented in his many tables and graphs in Weather influences. It is possible to reanalyze Dexter’s data with statistical techniques that were not available, or that were just appearing, as Dexter published his findings. Such a reanalysis may provide some useful perspectives on Dexter’s findings and also identify some of the more robust relationships among the many that he wrote about. Using Dexter’s work as an archival data source, a reanalysis may possess unique value in depicting weather-behavior relationships, especially during the heat of summer, before people were able to artificially cool their dwellings and workplaces with air conditioning systems (Shachtman 1999).

Biometeorology is a wonderfully integrative field with a rich history (Bouma 1987; Höppe 1997; Weihe 1997). The pure and applied research questions that gave rise to biometeorology stretch far into the past, beyond the formal establishment of the International Society of Biometeorology. Although I have examined the contributions of one researcher who primarily was interested in the behavioral aspects of human biometeorology, there are many other scientists whose work has been relevant in shaping the history, nature, and scope of the field. Professional historians working in this area have provided engaging accounts of the way that early meteorologists, citizens, business and economic interests, and governments have all shaped the contemporary expressions of meteorology and biometeorology (Fleming 1990, 1998; Fleming et al. 2006; Janković 2000; Mergen 2008; Meyer 2000; Whitnah 1961). Additional possibilities for historical scholarship in human behavioral biometeorology exist. For example, in his early article concerning the psychophysics of climate, Titchener (1909), with the help of Abbe, compiled a short bibliography of recent work. With respect to human behavior, Hellpach’s (1911) Die geopsychischen erscheinungen (The geopsychic phenomena) and Lehmann and Pedersen’s (1907) Das wetter und unsere arbeit (The weather and our work) provide unique perspectives on the ways that the atmospheric environment affected the brain, mind, and behavior (Stehr 1996). Within medical biometeorology, the works of Tromp (1963) and Petersen (1947) are worthy of historical research because of their sheer comprehensiveness and their influences on contemporary biometeorology (Folk 1994). In summary, acknowledging and examining the work of early contributors to our field can provide valuable contexts for our current research, may reveal new or novel sources of archival data, and ultimately may contribute to an enriched sense of a shared identity within biometeorology. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Bernard Mergen for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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