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as if the speaker anticipates a reaction of disbelief, horror and astonishment. “The heat
made me do it. I was forced against my better judgment to take the terrible risk of leaving
the windows open.”
For a good long while we thought that sleeping with the windows closed was one of those
security holdovers from the Middle Ages when brigands roamed the land and towns closed
their gates at nightfall. Eventually we learned that the real risk today had nothing to do with
break-ins or robberies: it was the vulnerability to sudden breezes! Just when you're hot and
sweaty, blissfully asleep and totally defenseless—what better time for a gust of wind to
blow in and make you sick?
What youmay notrealize—even thoughit'sobvious toeveryone inItaly—is that colds and
flu and backaches are caused by exposure to cool air. A blast of cool air is perilous enough,
but exposure to cool air when you are warm or sweating is guaranteed to make you sick. It
doesn't quite do it justice to call this a “belief”. It's more like a simple fact of life; everyone
knows that this is how things are.
When you come here from a place like Northern California after having spent decades en-
joying hot tubs on cold, blustery nights, it's quite strange to encounter this belief system.
But it gets even stranger when you realize that your Italian friends actually, truly, really do
get sick when they are exposed to a current of cold air. You begin to scratch your head in
wonder: How can this be? Hey, what about those Scandinavians who go right from their
sauna sweat lodges to roll in the snow—and stay healthier than seals?
***
Back in the sixties the French cultural historian, Michel Foucault, wrote an interesting es-
say on the early diagnosis of insanity called
Madness and Civilization: A History of Mad-
ness in the Age of Reason
. Medicine in the late Middle Ages was still firmly rooted in the
theories of ancient world, so hypotheses about illness were formulated in terms of the four
elements(earth,water,airandfire),thefourqualitiesthatwerederivedfromtheseelements
(cold, wet, dry and hot), and the four bodily humors that reflected these elements (black
bile, phlegm, blood and yellow bile). As we entered the age of enlightenment, instead of
imprisoning the mentally ill or packing them off to distant ports on a ship of fools, modern
medicine attempted to treat madness for the first time as a form of disease. Two distinct
strains of insanity—melancholy and hysteria—were the first to be identified by early re-
searchers, and each was explained in terms of an imbalance among bodily humors.
In a nutshell, melancholics, who sat around listlessly staring off into space, were under-
stood to have an excess of black bile (cold) and phlegm (wet) which made them sluggish
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