CLIMATE SANITARY RELATIONS. 463 



SANITARY RELATIONS. 



" IT would be no new thing to insist on the influence which climate 

 exerts upon the health ; but the continually increasing facilities for 

 traveling, and the locomotive spirit of the present age, invest the 

 subject, every day, with a fresh interest. Along with this, we find 

 the enlightened views of modern medical practice, enlarging the basis 

 of its curative means, and putting its trust not in the employment 

 of drugs only often, indeed, assigning to them but an ancillary 

 value but calling in the aid, without regard to its nature, of any 

 adjuvant that reasonably promises relief. And so it has recognized 

 in the change of air and scene, and in those moral and social influ- 

 ences which go along with them, to a degree far beyond what our 

 more immediate ancestors would have been prepared to admit, a most 

 powerful agent in the treatment of actual disease, and of those nu- 

 merous lesser ailments, the diffusion of which seems to advance with 

 the advance of civilization. To this end the admirable work of Sir 

 James Clark, the first, I believe, in which anything like a system of 

 sound principles was advanced for our guidance in the selection of 

 localities, has very much contributed."* 



"Physical causes-lie at the bottom of whatever differences the mal- 

 adies of different portions of the earth may present; and hence the 

 region which a medical historian selects, should have well-defined, 

 natural, and not merely conventional boundaries."! 



"These hydrographical facts (viz. of the Basin of the Alleghany 

 River) show that Chestnut Ridge and Laurel Hill are not boundary 

 mountains of our great valley, but are really included in it. Its true 

 limits are, in fact, the Alleghany Ridge in Pennsylvania and Northern 

 Virginia, while, in the southern part of the latter State, and in North 

 Carolina, the Blue Ridge is its actual terminus or rim. The medical 

 etiologist of the Interior Valley has, then, within his own jurisdic- 

 tion, a broad, alpine region, running through eight degrees of lati- 

 tude, with a mean elevation of fifteen hundred feet above the bed 

 and banks of the Mississippi, to which it is parallel ; and the time 

 will come when a comparison of the two belts, in the physiology and 



Francis, " Change of Climate." t Doike. 



