Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to cause visible damage. in the wake of the Calabrian earthquakes of 1783,
for instance, an italian physician cited “squeamishness” and “vertigo” as
among the symptoms of a seismic “influence on the animal economy,” the
result of an imbalance of electrical fluids and an excited imagination.
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self-
reports of dizziness and nausea thus became trusted indicators of ground
motion. Human fear likewise figured in scales of seismic intensity as a crite-
rion of earthquake strength. (This is true of nineteenth-century scales as well
as those in use today, including the Rossi-Forel [1883], Mercalli [1902], sie-
berg [1912], Mercalli-Cancani-sieberg [1932], and European Macroseismic
scale [1998].) The psyche, in this sense, was an essential component of the
human seismograph.
Moreover, the frequency and intensity of earthquakes in a given region
were understood as important factors in the physical and mental well-being
of the inhabitants. it was not just that repeated catastrophes might induce
barbarism, as Buckle suggested. People worried that even mild tremors, if
common, might be insalubrious. in this respect, they were following the
ancient belief that health is a property jointly of the body and of the land-
scape it dwells in.
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For instance, after the 1855 earthquake in Visp, swit-
zerland (see chapter 4), the Zurich physician Conrad Meyer-Ahrens noted
the variety of symptoms that ground movement could cause. in addition
to the numbness, nausea, and vertigo reported by witnesses to the Visp
tremors, he mentioned the “convulsive movements in the muscles, unusual
movements of fetuses, shivering, heart palpitations, claustrophobia, [and]
headaches” reported after the Calabrian earthquakes of the 1780s. “Natu-
rally,” he commented, “a portion of these phenomena, like the [miscar-
riages] and suppression of menstruation reported by Mignani as effects of
this earthquake, were the result of terror and fear.” A portion, but not all;
some must have been due to the release of toxic subterranean gases, “which
can be detected by a smell similar to that of wet clothes or rotting hay.” For
Meyer-Ahrens, the point was that earthquakes produced both direct and
indirect effects on human health, physical and mental. some of these ef-
fects could be long lasting, if they arose through “the transformation of the
earth's surface, the destruction of vegetation serving animals as food, floods,
changes in the weather, etc.”
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Earthquakes could thus harm people even in
the absence of physical injury, by disrupting the complex dependence of
human health on the environment.
it was only at the close of the nineteenth century that experts began to
dissociate the mental effects of an earthquake from its environmental and
physiological impacts. They began to describe the mental condition of earth-
quake survivors in terms of a new concept: traumatic “shock.” The notion of
