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April 7, 2022
- ISIDORE Id: 10670/1.e18ea1...
- hal: hal-04039700
- doi: 10.4324/9780429055478-9
HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral
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info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.4324/9780429055478-9
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Diseases and hygiene Wellness Personal health Sickness Human beings--Diseases Morbidity Illness Sicknesses Illnesses Carcinoma Cancers Malignancy (Cancer) Malignant tumors Biography--HealthCite this document
Guillaume Linte, « “Hot Climates” and Disease. Early Modern European Views of Tropical Environments », HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral, ID : 10.4324/9780429055478-9
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Abstract
This chapter explores the early modern development of medical literature on exotic diseases, a key concern of which was the health of Europeans living in hot countries or climates. The Tropic of Cancer had marked, more or less, the southern limit reached by European sailors in the Middle Ages. From the fifteenth century onwards, however, overseas voyages to the south and east required travelling through the so-called torrid zone between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Its habitability long debated, this region embodied difficult living conditions, and it logically ensued that the health of those who travelled or settled there would be affected. At the crossroads of medicine and geography, literature on exotic diseases, produced primarily by physicians and surgeons who served aboard ships or in the colonies, provided key inputs for contemporary understanding of intertropical environments – and especially the rain that was deemed to be especially disease-inducing.
