PHILADELHIA - Joseph Hollander's Climatron looked like a contraption from a bad horror movie. And to the suffering subjects he locked inside in the early 1960s, it probably felt like one.
The University of Pennsylvania physician was an arthritis expert of international renown. But he also was a proponent of an ancient, oddball science called biometeorology, which held that weather was a prime determinant of health.
In the most ambitious effort ever to prove it, he built an airtight, two-room chamber in the hospital and sent patients into it for two weeks at a stretch. Setting dials as big as dinner plates, he made the humidity, temperature and barometric pressure soar and drop, inflicting varying degrees of pain on the volunteers - and, to his satisfaction at least, affirming his thesis.
When he presented his findings 40 years ago in June, the medical world was abuzz, but only briefly. Climatron was dismantled. Hollander retired. And his legacy was left to legions of elderly aunts who consult their aching knees to predict rain.
Hollander, not to mention Aunt Martha, would love what's happening now: Biometeorology is back. While there is no lack of nonbelievers to dismiss most of it as hot air, it is attracting adherents in some surprisingly serious circles worldwide.
The renaissance has been inspired in part by global warming and concerns about its potential effect on human mortality. Would a warmer Earth be kinder to the body or deadlier?
No one knows, yet. But biometeorology's disciples are confident enough of other weather-health connections to try to make use of them.
Hospital alert system
Britain's national meteorological office has instituted a hospital-alert system using weather forecasts to warn of influxes of patients with particular maladies. Falling temperatures, for instance, supposedly trigger more heart attacks and respiratory infections.
During the Christmas holidays last year, according to the physician who runs the program, one hospital that heeded the forecast saved $1 million on staffing and other costs when the usual wave of respiratory ailments never materialized.
Germany's weather service contributes to daily public advisories for 50 afflictions thought to be affected by atmospheric activity, from allergies to strokes and psychoses. High humidity in the Schwarzwald? Beware of migraines.
"The Europeans are ahead of us," said Robert Davis, chairman of the American Meteorological Society's biometeorology committee, which first convened in the 1960s. Biometeorology may be less daring in America, but it is nonetheless alive and reasonably well - appropriately, in the cradle of Climatron.
Asthma warnings
This fall in Philadelphia, the federal Environmental Protection Agency will begin testing the nation's first asthma-warning system based on weather forecasts. The alerts will be issued 48 hours in advance.
Asthma attacks soar in late September. Some studies link them to arriving cold fronts, whose air-pressure and temperature changes might stress the body. One hypothesis holds that attacks are set off by indoor heating systems kicking in.
With summer just under way, the Philadelphia area also is the testing ground for a user-friendly heat-discomfort index, a collaboration of the National Weather Service and the University of Delaware. The index - scaled 1 to 10, from delightful to brutal - is computed from such factors as temperature and the air's sogginess.
There are other signs of biometeorology's resurgence in the United States. The International Society of Biometeorology, a 46-year-old Australia-based group, will hold its 16th International Congress in the heartland, Kansas City, Mo., this fall. More than 200 researchers have asked to present papers.
Board official Laurence Kalkstein, a University of Delaware climatologist, has been taken aback by the response. "There is no doubt that there is a growing awareness about biometeorology," he said. "It's definitely in a waxing situation."
Through much of human history, biometeorology was in a "waxing situation."
In 2650 B.C., the Chinese Emperor Hwang Ti - allegedly the first to observe that the heart is a pump - stated that hot weather strengthened the heart, while cold weather weakened the lungs. More than two millennia later, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, advised that doctors who wanted to know their patients had better know weather.
The notion was thriving even two millennia after that. The 18th-century physician and patriot Benjamin Rush prepared a report on the effects of weather on disease in Pennsylvania.
"Great and sudden changes may be considered the principle causes of the diseases of this state," he said. In summer, he warned, Pennsylvanians should watch out for colic, diarrhea and cholera.
With the advent of the microscope and advances in germ theory in the mid-19th century, the discipline faded into the background of medical research.
Some scientists wish it had stayed there.
"Weather and climate don't have nearly the effect on [health] that most people, including reputable scientists, believe," said Dennis Driscoll, an atmospheric scientist retired from Texas A&M; University. "It's my mission to convince them of this."
After studying biometeorology for 40 years, he has come to the same conclusion as other critics: Researchers often exaggerate correlations, while rarely managing to pinpoint the physiological mechanisms at work. He intends to be in Kansas City for the biometeorology congress to press that point.
"If you look for something," he warned, "you'll find it - whether it's there or not."
Few, however, would dispute the power of weather extremes. Philadelphians are subject to one of the wildest temperature ranges in the nation - from below zero to above 100 degrees. Not all survive.
Heat waves
Pioneering investigative work here in the 1990s proved that heat waves are the nation's No. 1 weather killer. Bodies unaccustomed to heat go to heroic lengths to survive. Vessels frantically expand and contract to bring blood close to the skin, so that excess heat empties into the cooler atmosphere. The body also resorts to sweat, which gives off a cooling effect as it evaporates.
This requires tremendous effort. Heartbeats can triple, even quadruple, with deadly effect.
But what happens in that vast middle range of weather, where changes are subtle? It is maddeningly difficult, experts acknowledge, to document links between two of the most volatile and mysterious entities in the cosmos: the atmosphere and the human body.
You can measure temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, but "how do you quantify pain?" asked Michael Trapasso, a Western Kentucky University professor and president of the American Institute of Biomedical Climatology, a research group. "There is no way to quantify something like the discomfort someone is reporting."
That has not stopped biometeorologists from trying:
My aching joints. "I know when the weather changes, my body changes," says Bill Bergey, a former Eagles linebacker who has had surgery on his knees, shoulders and back. "I can feel the aches and pains with the changing pressure."
The universality of that lament has kept some researchers looking to the atmosphere for clues. Robert Jamison, a Harvard-affiliated pain expert, says that while hard data are lacking, he cannot rule out changing air pressure as a suspect. It might "affect the subtle expansion/contraction of tissue," he said, "similar to the effect the atmosphere has on a balloon."
Pressure changes occur year-round, but are most frequent and dramatic in the fall.
My aching head. Like joint-pain sufferers, people with headaches tend to curse the sky.
Joseph Primavera, who runs the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital Headache Center, said there was "no strong science" to link their pain to weather. But, he said, "my own experience with headache patients is that it is common for them to experience barometric changes and changes in temperature as triggers."
Watch out. Health experts warn that heat and certain psychotropic drugs can be a toxic mix - a potential danger to the mentally ill. The same is true for alcohol and popular illegal drugs such as Ecstasy and PCP.
A 14-year study
Last spring, the American Academy of Neurology heard the results of a 14-year study of 3,300 first-time stroke patients. After monitoring temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind and sky cover, the authors reported distinct links between different weather conditions and types of strokes.
Other evidence suggests that strokes are more common in summer. William Bird, who runs the British hospital-alert system, said that on one wickedly hot London day in July 1995, strokes among women were 40 percent higher than normal.
A study in Madrid found a relationship between high barometric pressure and heart disease, while one in Tokyo concluded that fluctuating air pressure affected heart rhythms.
The researchers on all the projects said that, although the weather-health links were significant, what exactly was happening inside the subjects' bodies was still a mystery.
Joseph Hollander, father of Climatron, tried harder than anyone to figure it out. But even before his death in January 2000, his work had been consigned to obscurity.
The Climatron papers are locked away in the archives of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in Center City. They contain his grant proposals for the $500,000 chamber, letters from patients aching to get in, test results on more than 100 who did in the course of seven years - and a report affirming his faith in biometeorology.
"Despite the innumerable frustrations and hours of wasted effort to achieve data reportable only in a 'Journal of Negative Results,'" he wrote in 1968, "the 'old wives tale' that arthritics can predict the weather has been statistically proved."