In The Spectator of 25 July 1712, Joseph Addison offered his readers an account of "a Sett of merry Fellows, who are passing their Summer together in the Country." The group was said to be residing in a substantial house, which, along with apartments for all of the company, contained an infirmary "for the Reception of such of them as are any way Indisposed, or out of Humour." As the story unfolds, the members are dispatched, one by one, to the infirmary, as they succumb to bad temper, ill humor, passion, or some other condition that manifests itself in antisocial behavior. Addison’s imaginary correspondent speculates about the effects of immoderate diet and inclement weather in producing this epidemic of indisposition. The document as a whole gently probes the issue of the relations between bodily health and social interaction: on the one hand, the antisocial effects of failure to moderate the passions, and, on the other, the origins of disease itself in certain social conditions. With reference to this connection, it introduces the theme of my paper, for one of the company, having announced to the rest that, "he knew by a Pain in his Shoulder that we should have some Rain, the President ordered him to be removed, and placed as a Weather-glass in the Apartment above-mentioned."{1}

The human weather-glass or "human barometer" offers itself as an appropriate topic for this session, in which we explore how ideas of the nature of humanity were reshaped, in the course of the eighteenth century, by humans’ relations with animals and machines. Animals and machines, we propose, held up mirrors to human beings, displaying to them aspects of their biological and physical nature that they might or might not have been happy to acknowledge. They thus played crucial roles in those debates of the Enlightenment in which the nature of humanity was in question. On occasion, the comparison with non-human agents could be drawn to the advantage of humans, who were capable of doing things (such as making machines) that animals and machines could not themselves do. At other times, however, animals and machines could appear as disturbing reminders that humans were themselves fundamentally biological or material entities, raising issues that were troublesome for eighteenth-century thinkers to deal with. The problem was posed with particular urgency when animals or machines assumed, in some respect, human roles—when they reproduced some aspect of human behavior or otherwise transgressed the categorical boundaries of humanity. In confronting these new experiences of living and manufactured things, eighteenth-century thinkers were obliged to grapple with what differentiated humans from animals and machines, and what they had in common.

I shall argue that the "human barometer" functioned as an organizing metaphor for the medical and meteorological writings of the early eighteenth century that concerned the body’s responses to changes in the physical environment. The metaphor brought into focus what was at least an analogy—and sometimes thought to be more like an identity—between the behavior of a meteorological instrument and the human body’s reactions to environmental conditions.{2} Did the behavior of the barometer, then, correlate with bodily states like the pain in the shoulder? Could the apparatus foretell rain even more reliably, or would human bodies always be (in a sense) "better" barometers than the instruments themselves? These questions were raised, toward the end of the seventeenth century, by the work of leading experimental philosophers who pioneered the study of the barometer. They were given a wider currency through the marketing of the device as a consumer item for genteel households, a development that began in England in the 1680s. As an experimental instrument that also became a household object, the barometer became a convenient point of reference for discourse on the relations between health and climate. This discourse had already been part of the ancient Hippocratic tradition, resuscitated during the Renaissance. It was, however, significantly reoriented in the early eighteenth century, in at least two respects. First, the use of the barometer (along with such other instruments as the thermometer and hygrometer) focused attention on more rapid changes in atmospheric conditions—on the diurnal (or even hourly) fluctuations of weather, in other words, rather than the more stable patterns of climate. Second, the behavior of the barometer was more mysterious than that of the thermometer in certain crucial respects: It responded to changes in the atmosphere that the senses could not directly detect, and it appeared to predict changes in the weather in advance of their occurrence. The notion that the barometer might indicate changes that the human body was also undergoing was, therefore, an intriguing suggestion but also a cryptic one. The "human barometer" signified a relationship between the body and the atmosphere, of which the conscious mind was not entirely aware, and which seemed in some way to foretell the future.

Analogies between the human body and the barometer underwrote the use of the instrument in empirical programs of research to determine the influence of climate and weather on health. Meteorological instruments were practical tools for investigating these effects, taking their place alongside the "literary technology" of the daily journal in attempts to compile diurnal and seasonal records of weather and diseases. These projects, undertaken by numerous investigators in England and elsewhere, issued in diaries of the weather and diseases in particular locations, which sometimes extended over many years or even decades. Some observers inscribed themselves and their own bodily ailments into their narratives, situating themselves both as observers and as instruments. Although the enterprise did not bear the hoped-for fruit, namely laws that would connect changes in the weather with the incidence of disease, it did foreshadow the collection of other kinds of statistical information regarding the health and living conditions of populations. By the late eighteenth century, in England and in other countries, the study of environmental factors in disease was to support programs of moral and social discipline designed to improve the health of the populace.

While the notion of the human barometer facilitated this kind of empirical research, it also raised problematic issues. Talk of the body as a barometer invoked the specter of a purely material connection between human beings and their physical environment. The suggestion that feelings and even thoughts were subject to the influence of the material surroundings was widely resisted, or at least qualified. If the human body was a kind of barometer, it was generally reckoned important that the mind also be brought into the picture as a check upon bodily weaknesses. Thus, the discourse on climate and disease had a distinctly moralistic dimension. Healthy living was said to follow from the adoption of an appropriate regimen, a set of rules by which the mind would discipline the body. The enterprise of public health in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to draw upon these schemes of regimen, broadening them in their application from the individual to the population at large. But, in its original manifestation, the human barometer had already represented both an individual body subject to external climatic influences and the dangerous social consequences that could follow from this condition. Individuals who were over-sensitive to their meteorological milieu were shown to be suffering from a species of madness or enthusiasm which threatened moral order. Regimen was the means by which the phantom of susceptibility to the effects of climate would be exorcised, both at the individual and the social level. The metaphor of the human barometer served, then, to focus debate about the rule of the mind over the body and the rule of the enlightened over potentially unruly elements in society. It stood at the nexus where humanity encountered the environment and medicine connected with social order.

By the late seventeenth century, the notion that climate had a significant effect on human bodily and mental states already had a lengthy history behind it. In the fifth century BC, the texts of the Hippocratic corpus, the Aphorisms, the seven books of Epidemics, and especially Airs, Waters, Places, traced the onset of epidemics to the changes of the seasons or to meteorological conditions in the places affected. Physicians were encouraged to give advice on where were the healthiest places to live, paying attention to such factors as prevailing winds, soil types, and the proximity of marshes and other sources of "bad air." They were promised that, if they knew enough about what weather was typical of a particular place and season, they would be able to predict the diseases that would occur in a coming year. Other ancient authors, including Aristotle and Galen, combined the Hippocratic emphasis on climate with the theory of bodily humors. The fundamental conditions of health and disease were sought in the prevalence of certain humors within the body, or the motions of fluids and solids through it. These internal conditions were thought to be influenced by external environmental forces. In the Renaissance, such influences were assimilated to the model of human macrocosm and cosmic microcosm, linked by multiple relations of signification and causal interdependence. Robert Burton’s musings on the influence of air on bodily and emotional health, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), descended from this Renaissance rearticulation of the classical tradition.{3}

The first weather instruments, the water-filled "weather-glasses" of the early seventeenth century, were initially understood as material signifiers of the microcosm-macrocosm connection. They also reawakened the interest in prediction that had been a feature of the Hippocratic writings on climate. In these devices, the level of water in a tube was seen to vary as a bubble of air trapped by the water contracted or expanded. By the 1630s, various designs of this apparatus were being advertised by London shop-keepers. The comments of Robert Fludd and others make clear that the devices were viewed as concrete metaphors for the human body, with humoral states ("sanguine," "phlegmatic," and so on), or other disease conditions (such as "dropsical" and "feverish"), marked on the scales of the instruments themselves. Weather-glasses apparently offered a direct reading of the qualities of the air as they impinged upon bodily health. Purchasers were also told that, by prolonged observation, they would be enabled to predict or "visibly presage the approaching weather." The classical focus upon the time-scale of the changing seasons was now narrowed considerably, however. Observation of the weather-glass would allow one to know the weather only up to a few days ahead.{4}

In the late seventeenth century, weather-glasses were displaced from their roles as concrete metaphors for the body’s relations to the macrocosm, and as putative means of prediction, by barometers. Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, John Wallis, John Beale, and other members of the early Royal Society, worked in the 1660s to correlate variations in the level of the mercury in a barometer tube with concurrent or approaching weather conditions. A few connections emerged fairly clearly: The mercury stood high during calm, fair conditions, and also during winter frosts; a fall in level generally presaged rain or a storm. But even these patterns were not found to be valid without exceptions, and little further could be established with any certainty. The uncertainty did not prevent—in fact it may even have encouraged—the quite rapid diffusion of barometers as luxury consumer items, a trend well underway by the end of the seventeenth century. In 1708, the writer Richard Neve declined to offer instructions for making a barometer, since, he said, "any one may be furnished with it in London, at a cheaper rate than he can make it himself … Few gentlemen [are] without one of them." By 1710, another observer was describing barometers as a kind of "Philosophical … Furniture," commonly found "in most Houses of Figure and Distinction."{5}

The rather strange phrase "philosophical furniture" suggests how purchasers of barometers in the early eighteenth century were inspired to act and to view themselves as experimental philosophers. They were encouraged by Neve and a number of other writers (including Gustavus Parker, John Patrick, and John Smith) to prepare the mercury and fill the barometer tube with care, to take observations methodically and to record them, and to regard themselves as participants in an experimental enterprise led by such natural philosophers as Boyle, Hooke, and even Isaac Newton. At the same time they acted as observers, however, the users of barometers were also expected to respond as experimental subjects, because of the way the instrument reflected human experiences of changing atmospheric conditions. As they watched the movement of the mercury in the tube, observers were also monitoring their own health and feelings, since they were told that the instrument’s behavior bore upon them. It was in this setting that the figure of the "human barometer" was born: the individual whose reactions to changes in the atmosphere were mirrored by the rising and sinking of the mercury level. As early as 1673, Boyle had reasoned from experiments with the air-pump that many liquids contained dissolved air that would be released under diminished pressure. Thus, he was "prone to suspect, that the very Alterations of the Atmosphere in point of weight may, in some cases, have some not contemptible Operations even upon mens Sickness or Health."{6} John Arbuthnot, whose Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733) became one of the founding texts of Enlightenment research on climate and health, made the same connection: "I have observ’d very sensible Effects of sudden falls of the Mercury in the Barometer in tender People, and all the Symptoms they would have felt by the Exsuction of so much Air in an Air-Pump." Susceptible individuals, Arbuthnot noted, experienced "lypothymies" during sudden drops in air pressure, undergoing convulsions like the mice and birds Boyle had put to death in the evacuated receiver of his pump.{7}

Recognition that the human body could be affected like the barometer was not, in fact, tied to any specific theory of how the instrument itself behaved. Martin Lister, a Fellow of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century with quite a different theory of the barometer from Boyle’s, agreed that the device was a good sign of how bodily humors were being affected by environmental conditions. Neve and Smith read the barometer primarily as an indicator of atmospheric moisture, but they concluded, "the lower the Quicksilver descends, the more listless and out of order Men’s Bodies are, because the Air is then full of that which is disagreeable to the Nature of Man, who was not made to live in a Watry Element." When the mercury was high, on the other hand, "Men’s Bodies are … found to be more Brisk and Lively."{8} In the first half of the eighteenth century, the consensus view became that barometric pressure was primarily felt through its influence on the motions of bodily fluids. Dr. Thomas Short summed up in 1750, asserting that, in conditions of high pressure, "we find ourselves brisk and lively, from the greater Velocity of the Blood, and fuller and juster Discharge of all natural and necessary Secretions and Evacuations." Excessively high pressure posed risks to health, however, as did very low pressure, which would cause a dangerous diminution of circulation and perspiration. The same view was voiced in the "philosophick poem" of John Phelps, published in 1743, appropriately entitled The Human Barometer: Or, Living Weather-Glass:

The pois’d Barometer will sink or rise,
In Mode proportion’d to the changing Skies, …
The Air serene, from Clouds and Vapours clear,
Not burnt with Heat, nor chill’d with Cold severe;
Adjusts the Motion of the circling Blood,
The Pulse beats right, the Circulation’s good;
Vapours and Storms aerial Weight abate,
Our Blood runs low, and languid is our State,
If Cold or Heat prevail to great Excess,
More than we ought, we then perspire or less …{9}

Because the barometer was taken as a sign of the effects of atmospheric conditions upon the body, it made sense to use the device to explore the relations between weather and states of health. Short gave a list of the diseases that might be expected to coincide with extreme barometric conditions: "Quinzies, Pleurisies, Peripneumonies, [and] ardent Fevers" with high pressure; "Hysterics, Hippo, intermitting, remitting, putrid, slow, nervous, [and] eruptive Fevers" with low pressure. Air-pressure was not necessarily regarded as the most important atmospheric variable in relation to health, but there was general agreement that the changes revealed by the barometer must have some medical significance, especially if they were rapid and of large magnitude. Hence, barometers, along with thermometers, hygrometers, and wind gauges, became part of the instrumental armory of researchers who charted the patterns of coincidence of weather and disease. Beginning in the 1660s, with the work of Hooke and John Locke, readings of weather instruments were collected by observers who had at least one eye on concurrent incidents of disease. In the first half of the eighteenth century, several records of this kind were published. Clifton Wintringham used the barometer and thermometer in his record of weather and diseases in York over two decades. John Huxham, a doctor in Plymouth, used both these instruments and a hygrometer in his Observations on the Air and Epidemic Diseases (1739). William Hillary recorded nine years’ readings of the barometer and observations of diseases in Ripon in Yorkshire, and then six years’ in Barbados. Other observers, including Dr. Thomas Hughes, of Stroud in Gloucestershire, and Dr. John Bayly, of Chichester in Sussex, compiled records of several years’ duration that never made it into print.

While these observers sustained their records for many years, the use of the barometer in this kind of enterprise directed attention at shorter intervals of time than the seasons, which had traditionally been the focus of Hippocratic research on climate and health. Meteorological instruments responded to more rapid—and less extreme—changes in the weather, from day to day or even from hour to hour. The shift was registered in the work of Dr. Thomas Sydenham, a leading Hippocratic practitioner, in the mid 1670s. Sydenham’s long-standing interest in the seasonal character of epidemic outbreaks was redirected at that time toward the effect of day-by-day changes in the weather. He began to record such changes when they coincided with the emergence or disappearance of smallpox, dysentery, pleurisy, or fevers—an approach that can plausibly be linked to the growing interest in weather diaries and instruments among Sydenham’s friends in the Royal Society.

The shift in time-scale, from seasonal patterns of climate to diurnal variations of weather, was made possible by the "literary technology" of the diary as well as by the material technology of instrumentation. As Stuart Sherman has recently emphasized in his book Telling Time (1996), the late seventeenth century saw the widespread adoption in England of new techniques of time-division and its discursive representation. In personal journals, newspapers, and periodicals, the framework of time—finely divided, uniform, and universal—was established in advance of the occurrence of specific events. In Sherman’s view, this development was indebted to improvements in the design of mechanical clocks and the increased prevalence of watches in private ownership. The diary, represented preeminently by Samuel Pepys’s text of the 1660s, unfolded the narrative of events within the framework of date and time, constituted in advance by public authority. It is striking, and surely not merely coincidental, that weather journals emerged from the same Restoration scientific circles that included the great diarists Pepys, Hooke, and John Evelyn. Weather diarists worked within the outline of the public calendar, usually established graphically by drawing lines on the blank page to mark spaces for each day in the month to come. When instruments were read more than once a day, temporal divisions finer than the diurnal were used. Such a procedure attests to the governing notion of a neutral framework of time, configured prior to and independently of events, which was indefinitely extensible and divisible.

The literary form of the diary offered itself as a discursive framework for recording changes in the weather on a daily basis. Many journals, from the seventeenth century on, include meteorological notes, either as a regular feature of the daily remarks or on occasions of unusual weather occurrences. The specific genre of the weather diary grew out of the use of general journals to record such details. Diaries could also be used to register the state of health of the author. Several of the most prominent diarists, including Pepys, Hooke, and the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin, used their journals to make extensive annotations on their own bodily ailments and those of others around them. Symptoms were described, illnesses diagnosed, treatments prescribed, and their effects monitored. If historians have been able to learn so much about the history of medicine from diaries of this period, it is because the diarists themselves found the form a convenient one to use to document their experiences of illness.{10}

One document that combines, in a uniquely vivid way, a weather record with a journal of bodily health and ailments has recently come to light. A copy of the text, a weather diary for the year 1703, is in the National Meteorological Archive, in Bracknell, Berkshire. I have traced the original to the archives of Lancing College, West Sussex, and have tentatively identified the author as a Worcestershire gentleman named Thomas Appletree (1680-1728). Appletree was educated at Oxford in the late 1690s, admitted as a student to one of the Inns of Court, and then retired to the West Country to reside for the remainder of his life on his family estate. The diary describes, in self-consciously metaphorical and highly inventive language, the phenomena of the weather on every day of the year: the appearances of clouds, the rising and subsiding of storms, the formations of ice and frost, the coming of spring warmth, the clearing of the atmosphere after showers. Throughout, the author deploys the ideas of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, including Boyle, Descartes, and Athanasius Kircher, to sketch a model of the circulation of effluvia and vapors between the earth and the air. The earth is said to exhale subterranean vapors into the atmosphere, and the air in turn fertilizes the earth with falls of nutritive rain. Against this background of cosmic meteorological drama, or what he calls the "Atmospherical Theatre," Appletree monitors and records his own bodily condition and emotional state.

Appletree designated his diary "my Ephemeris or Historicall Remarques on vicissitudes of weather, with a narrative of its course & Tracing it in its various winding meanders round the year"; but he also referred to it as "the grand history & picture of my own life."{11} The document captures for us the experience of a man who registered the effects of the weather on his own body—a real-life human barometer, indeed. The diarist perceived the state of the elements in terms of his own moods, registering the sky as "sad" or "uncomfortable," the atmosphere as "smiling" or "cheerful." Such anthropomorphism reflected, as he noted, the limitations of the descriptive vocabulary available to him: "I cannot invent a Language commensurate to [the] vast & infinite Properties discoverable in meteorology," he lamented.{12} But, the connections between observer and environment were more substantial than this. Repeatedly, the diarist noted how the weather affected his emotional state. A "chill driving Rain" was "a kind of weather as never fails to discompose me." The burning heat of July "made me feint & allmost swoon & even wasted me to the degree of deliquium animi." A lightning flash made "a naturall impression & terrible surprize on my spirits… [and] just exanimated me, so superlative & extraordinary enormous a fright I never was sensible of in all my life."{13} An October day with heavy clouds was a "temper of weather [that] exactly corresponds to my saturnine & quiet melancholy Genius … [and] carries a mysterious secret & unknown Conformity to my being."{14} These effects were understood both as instances of sympathies between macrocosm and microcosm and as examples of material causation. An agreeable misty rain was "A soothing Anodyne to my perplexing vexations, & strikes unison to my constitution & falls in patt with my humour"; it was also "weather as chiefly settles the fibres of the brain & ideas even."{15} Appletree was working both with the Renaissance vocabulary of correspondences and harmonies, and with the ideas of causation derived from the mechanical philosophy, as he tried to comprehend how the weather affected him.

At times, Appletree’s sense of communion with the elements reached an ecstatic height that he described in sensual—even, on occasion, erotic—terms. An exceptionally clear day in August "perfectly revived & fed me & I drunk it in at the open windows of the soul"; it "provoked me to soar aloft, & allmost mount above grovelyng mortality, & dart above by force of extasy: the distinct proper & congeniall joys of a Contemplative spirit; the merit & due reward of indefatigable Thought & study."{16} Fine weather enabled Appletree to overcome scholarly melancholy and questionable physical health, to turn his meteorological meditations into a vision of ecstatic communion with the atmosphere. On the other hand, a day of mist and rain in October had "a sort of passionate Lachrymall serenity, [which] Ravisht me into softest & most amiable contemplations, Tickled & sooth’d me into gratefull content & flusht with silent peacefull solid joy … even embraced & folded my soul in the bosom of its own bliss."{17} Clouds, in particular, inspired Appletree to heights of rapture; he spent long hours contemplating them, classifying them, and trying to describe them in literal and metaphorical terms. On 3 November, he records, "I spent a good part of the day in admiring & feeding my eager curiosity with feasting my eies & Regaling my cloud-born or Nubigenous Genius, like Ixion engendered of a cloud, I am ever gazing & as it were Returning to my womb."{18}

If my identification of the diarist is correct, this account was penned by a young man of twenty-three, still—and destined to remain—unmarried. His erotic terminology for moments of contemplative bliss was part of a thoroughly sexualized vision of the cosmos. Rain was said to originate in "the Gulf, bosom & vagina of the ocean; the most secret Recesses, cu—t or Rima magna." It fell as "spermatic irrigation," released by the "copulation & coition of the two elements" (earth and water), upon spring vegetation "blown up tight & stiff with longing desires, & flatus of youthful lust."{19} Appletree perceived the natural world as an arena of sexual activity on a cosmic scale. His sense of participation in this, at least to the extent of using erotic language to express his own communion with the elements, was a crucial dimension of his experience as weather observer and human barometer.

Appletree’s diary does not record any readings of meteorological instruments. His emphasis was on verbal narrative and his prime concern was with finding the right words to frame his account of the weather. "I tire myself with Pumping for apt terms & similes to illustrate my Thoughts," he complained. He did, nonetheless, use instruments metaphorically as images for atmospheric processes. The "Æolipile," a simple steam-engine, was invoked as a model for the water-spouts by which he believed oceanic water was projected into the atmosphere. Appletree may have picked up the image from Ralph Bohun’s Discourse Concerning the Origin and Properties of Wind (1671); he used it to try to account for the origins of the "Great Storm" of November 1703, the subject of a tract by Daniel Defoe.{20} Elsewhere, Appletree invoked the motions of air in a "thermoscope" or weather-glass by way of analogy to those in the atmosphere.{21} The use of these instrumental metaphors indicated that his vision of the meteorological cosmos was not purely organic; he also figured it as a kind of machine. "The surface we live upon," he wrote, "is but shell, crust, & bore outside of a mighty piece of mechanism, the case of the clockwork within."{22}

It seems telling that Appletree deployed both organic and mechanistic models of the cosmos simultaneously. The meteorological world was imaged by him as both an organism (or pairs of organisms in sexual congress) and a giant machine. He drew upon one of the standard tropes of the mechanical philosophy to suggest that, "we cannot penetrate into the oeconomy & mysterious inward fabric of this huge machine, we see only the outside & superficial Plan of it, not the wonders within."{23} It was in mechanistic terms that he expected the relationship between meteorological and geological processes eventually to be understood, even though the relationship was also figured in organic metaphors. In this respect, the cosmos was portrayed in the same ambivalent terms as the human body. The late seventeenth century had seen the body conceptualized as a kind of machine in the texts of the mechanical philosophers and the iatromechanical writers on medicine. The body emerged from the works of Giovanni Borelli, and others, as a structure of fibers and tubes, with muscles pivoted upon bones and fluids coursing through pipes. It was to be studied through the sciences of dynamics and hydraulics, since it shared mechanical properties with the great machine of the world. It was in this connection that the weather-glass or barometer could stand as a metaphor for the body, an apparatus that responded to the mechanical forces of the atmosphere, as would the fluids and solids of the body itself. Thomas Appletree’s diary displays the mechanistic models of the cosmos and the body, at the intersection of which the figure of the human barometer arose.

I know of no other document quite like the 1703 Weather Diary; I certainly would not claim it is in any respect "typical" of the genre of meteorological journals. Appletree evidently thought of himself as forging an entirely new language for weather observations and drew upon metaphorical and philosophical resources to do so. He also situated himself in his narrative in a peculiarly intimate way, using his bodily reactions and emotional state as a lens to bring into focus the phenomena of the weather. No other individual known to me so perfectly personifies the figure of the human barometer, or brings us so close to an understanding of what it felt like to be one. Most weather observers in the eighteenth century focused their attention almost entirely away from their own bodies, toward external phenomena and objective readings of instruments. They adopted minimalist prose styles, paring down verbal narrative to formulaic phrases or discarding it altogether in favor of tables of instrumental measurements. A high degree of ritual and discipline in the collection and recording of routine observations might even have been a way of keeping at bay the disruptive demands of the body. Most weather diaries made only very occasional references to the personal circumstances of the diarist himself, usually to explain instances when the writer’s indisposition caused a gap in his observations. By effacing the subjectivity of the observer in this way, and neglecting his potential use as a meteorological instrument, weather diarists couched their work as contributions to a collective public enterprise. They published their observations as offerings to the public fund of knowledge, gathered on the understanding that many such records would be necessary before, eventually, the laws governing the weather would be revealed. Valid contributions to this collective task could only be made by observers who presented themselves as objective recorders of external data. The human barometer had no place in this project.

This is not to say, however, that the figure was absent from other writings on weather in the early eighteenth century. Although I know of no other author who adopted the persona of the human barometer as consistently as Appletree, a number of writers referred nostalgically to an intimate relationship between the body and the environment as a feature of the state of nature that had been lost in the conditions of urban and commercial development. Thus, John Claridge, who compiled The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather in 1744, put forward a fund of rustic weather lore as an alternative to reliance upon the newfangled instruments in which town-dwellers were inclined to place their trust. Readers were advised that the traditional signs of the rural "weather-wiser," including "the cawing of Ravens, the chattering of Swallows, and a Cat’s washing her face," were to be depended upon more than barometers and thermometers, which "undoubtedly contribute very little to the prognosticating a Change of Weather at a Distance."{24} Similarly, Thomas Short advised his rural reader to attend to the book of nature when looking to predict the weather, "whilst the Citizen, who wants his Opportunities, may attend to the Barometer and Thermometer, which often deceive him." This being the case, urbanites would be foolish to despise country lore as mere vulgar superstition.{25} John Mills, a writer on agricultural improvement, also insisted that the barometer was but an imperfect means of restoring a connection with the environment that had been sundered by the circumstances of modern life: "By the help of the barometer, we seem to regain that foreknowledge of the weather which still resides in brutes, and which we forfeited, both by not continuing in the open air as they generally do, and by our intemperance’s lessening our sensibility of external objects."{26}

In the reference to intemperance, Mills indicated the moralizing dimension of discourse on the barometer and its relation to the human body. That people should have to resort to an instrument to tell them what they should feel naturally showed that an intemperate style of life had dulled their responsiveness to the world around them. In this respect, reliance on barometers might itself be condemned as a kind of urban superstition, a resort to quasi-magical means of augury or prognostication when natural ones had failed. This was the suggestion of an essay by Samuel Johnson in The Idler of 5 August 1758: "The rainy weather which has continued the last month, is said to have given great disturbance to the inspectors of barometers. The oraculous glasses have deceived their votaries; shower has succeeded shower, though they predicted sunshine and dry skies; and by fatal confidence in these fallacious promises, many coats have lost their gloss, and many curls been moistened to flaccidity."{27} Those who placed their trust in weather instruments appeared, in Johnson’s caricature, as guilty of a peculiar kind of hubris; they had attempted to circumvent nature to second-guess the course of providence, and, furthermore, had done so for the sake of vanity and luxury. On these counts, they deserved condemnation as modern-day omen-mongers.

Johnson was also inclined to rail specifically against those individuals who represented themselves as human barometers, claiming an acute sensitivity to the effects of climate on their physical and emotional well-being. To Johnson, the pretense that weather affected one’s health or mood suggested a simple weakness of the will, as James Boswell recorded him saying on numerous occasions. An issue of The Idler in December 1758 presented the monitory example of the "Journal of a Senior Fellow": extracts from the supposed diary of a dissipated Cambridge don, whose fruitless life was regulated by a neurotic degree of attention to his barometer.{28} Johnson had discussed the general issues at stake in a piece in the same periodical on 24 June of that year:

Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than to resign its powers to the influence of the air … To call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly. Yet even in this age of enquiry and knowledge, when superstition is driven away, and omens and prodigies have lost their terrors, we find this folly countenanced by frequent examples.{29}

Johnson’s indictment raised the specter of the human barometer as a threat to moral order. For him, to ascribe to the atmosphere the power to affect health and mood was to abandon the primacy of reason and revert to primitive superstition. The theme was developed in his novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). In an episode in that tale, the hero encounters an astronomer who believes that prolonged and deep study has given him the power to control the winds and rains over the entire planet. The astronomer, however, is mad; and it is Rasselas’s duty to part him from his delusions and restore him to sanity. His madness is ascribed to scholarly melancholy and isolation from the refreshing diversions of social interaction: "No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. … He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not."{30} The hubris of believing in one’s own "airy notions" was a symptom of pathological social isolation, in Johnson’s view, to be treated by a course of polite sociability, including interactions with members of the opposite sex.

For other writers, however, the pathology of the human barometer was linked to too much sociability, of the wrong kind. In his poem, The Human Barometer, Phelps mused on the "connection strange" by which a change in the physical circumstances of the body affected the mind. The bonds between the material body and the immaterial mind or soul were an undeniable, if unsettling, reality. Atmospheric states could produce a variety of conditions, including extremes of mental disturbance. Phelps mentioned two of these: the madness of the inmates of Bedlam, where "Bile redundant overwhelms the sense … [and] agitated Juices Frenzy shows"; and the religious enthusiasm of the followers of the Methodist preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield is presented as preaching just outside Bedlam and evoking from his hearers just the kind of irrational behavior that would be expected from those within the institution’s walls. "Gesture and Voice betray the heated Brain / In Groans his Converts eccho back again, / And Souls impress’d with Thoughts of Grace, or Sin, / Expectorate their Sense in solemn Din. / These of enthusiastick Transports boast, / But are to Argument and Reason lost." In this context, the climatic susceptibility of the human barometer presents the threat of disruption of the social order, to which the remedy is a regime of temperance.

If we the Rules of Temperance neglect,
The Course of Nature we ourselves subvert,
And into Poison wholesome Food convert …
Since then both Health and inward Peace invite,
In Virtue’s Paths let all my Powers unite,
O teach me, Wisdom, this thy heav’nly Art,
With virtuous Principles to guard my Heart,
Let not the Animal reign without Controul,
But be directed by the nobler Soul, …
Then will the proper Balance be maintain’d,
When Sense by Reason’s Dictates is restrain’d.{31}

Phelps presented the human barometer as the archetype of the individual who had lost his or her reason under the sway of external influences, whether meteorological or social. En masse, this condition called for the application of social discipline to restore the rule of reason, lest Bedlam come to envelop society at large. In medical discourse, also, climatically-induced conditions were said to be curable by temperance or "regimen," a therapeutic regime with a clear moral dimension. As Phelps praised temperance as the path of virtue, medical writers did not hesitate to identify the moral failings that increased their patients’ susceptibility to the effects of the weather. They particularly seized any opportunity to condemn the debilitating results of fashion or luxury, frequently in strongly gender-loaded terms. Overindulgence in tea and coffee drinking, for example, "so much in Use amongst the Ladies," could only increase their sensitivity to weather-related diseases.{32} Hillary castigated European residents in the West Indies who were so enslaved to fashion that they wore clothing that was too heavy for the hot climate, and contracted a variety of diseases as a result.{33} Arbuthnot identified as particularly unhealthy the unventilated rooms in which "People of Fashion pass a great deal of their time." "Ladies and other tender People," he noted, suffered the effects of air "tainted very much with the Steams of Animals and Candles."{34} For these writers, too great a sensitivity to the effects of climate was a symptom of moral weakness and corruption, brought on by fashion and luxury. Such tenderness was, not surprisingly, often identified with women or reckoned a sign of general effeminacy.

And yet, the early eighteenth century was the age in which a certain kind of "sensibility" came to be widely applauded as an attribute of the enlightened individual. Addison’s Spectator, although it condemned the inconstancy that allowed a change of weather to affect the mood as "the greatest Weakness of humane Nature," also advanced sensibility as a touchstone of civilized taste.{35} As G. J. Barker-Benfield has recently argued, the rise of the "culture of sensibility" grounded new standards of refinement and politeness in an expansion of the domain of human sympathy. Entertainments and manners of a previous age were condemned as "rude" and "vulgar," when measured by the criterion of a more developed sensitivity to the feelings of others. Aesthetic discussions drew upon medical discourse on the workings of the "nerves" and "spirits" in the formulation of this doctrine. A general "feminization of manners" was characteristic of refinements of taste in behavior, literature, personal possessions, and the fine arts.{36} The human barometer was, perhaps, one representation of the anxieties created by these developments. A heightened sensitivity to one’s physical surroundings suggested, to some, the surrender of rational control over feelings, deeds, and even thoughts. As human beings became creatures of enhanced sensibility, it was feared they would lose their autonomy. The human barometer signified a disturbingly materialistic dependence of the mind upon the physical environment, a capitulation of reason to the operations of the nervous spirits.

If the image declined in prevalence after the middle of the century, it was probably because of the various ways in which human control over both the physical and the social environment was felt to be more firmly established. As Keith Thomas has shown, human sympathy was increasingly extended to embrace the natural world as it was brought gradually under human domination. People came to feel a greater sense of emotional identification with trees, flowers, animals, or landscape, as nature was brought within the realm of enlightened cultivation and improvement. Such projects were paralleled by those of medical enlightenment, in which schemes of regimen were extended in their application from individuals to society at large. Reflecting this, the scientific lecturer Adam Walker noted in 1777 that it was appropriate for an age of "philosophy and enlarged sentiment" to locate in the air the causes of diseases that a previous age of "religious tyranny" had ascribed to divine action.{37} Walker’s friend, Joseph Priestley, assured his contemporaries that the quality of the air could be vitiated or meliorated at will. Chemists and doctors tested the air in prisons, hospitals, and slums, and recommended improvements in the construction of these facilities. They drew encouragement from the writings of Montesquieu, who had urged wise rulers to take measures to counter the bad effects of climate upon human health. Using the resources of social statistics, medical reformers such as Thomas Short, John Fothergill, Thomas Percival, and many others, sought to extend their therapeutic regime over the population at large, to ensure access to healthy air by comprehensive social discipline.{38}

In this context, the human barometer became a less potent figure. Although the barometer continued to be used by researchers on meteorological medicine, it was eclipsed in importance by statistical measures of the health of particular populations and (from the 1770s) by a new instrument, the "eudiometer," which supposedly gave a direct measure of the healthiness of the air. The decline of the human barometer also reflected an increased sense that human beings could manipulate the effects of the air upon their health, rather than being subject to them. Projects to drain marshes, remove cemeteries and soil-pits from near to human habitations, and build well-ventilated houses and spacious streets, all addressed the aim of providing people with an atmosphere that would improve their health.{39} In the context of a more activist approach to the climatic conditions of health and disease, the human barometer became little more than a joke. In 1733, Arbuthnot had remarked, in all seriousness, "I wish I could thoroughly understand the Cause of a Corn’s aching before Rain, from which I should be able to explain the Causes of all those Pains which affect some Bodies in wet Weather." Later in the century, in verses ascribed to the vaccinationist Edward Jenner, the person who is a martyr to climatically induced ailments is significantly gendered female, and is little more than a figure of fun:

Hark how the chairs and tables crack!
Old Betty’s joints are on the rack;
Her corns with shooting-pains torment her
And to her bed untimely sent her; …
’Twill surely rain,—I see with sorrow
Our jaunt must be put off to-morrow.{40}

2.  Terry Castle, "The Female Thermometer."