Medical Climatology in France: The Persistence of Neo-Hippocratic Ideas in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In interwar France the Lyonnais physician Marius Piéry undertook an ambitious Neo-Hippocratic research program to study how atmospheric and terrestrial environments influenced health. Lyon had a number of institutions linked to the colonies and was a center for the training of military physicians. Colonial physicians had a long tradition of contending with the diseases of tropical environments, and their ideas and many returned colonials circulated in Lyon and its region. Piéry was a physician during World War I and published on military medical topics. He also included colonial and military health concerns in his more mature works from the 1930s. An advocate of the close study of the physical sciences, he investigated the radioactive gases of health spas and the effects of altitude on pulmonary tuberculosis, and he directed a meteorological observatory.