Atmospheric Electricity and Disease

Abstract

LAST summer I had the honour of making the acquaintance of Dr. Schliep, of Baden-Baden. He is well known to English medical specialists. He urged me to design a recording electrometer, such as would enable medical men to study atmospheric electricity. I found that he himself had made daily observations for twenty years, using a gold-leaf electroscope, which enabled him to say whether the air had strong or weak, positive or negative, electric potential, at the end of a water-dropping collector. He showed me that he had made an earnest study of the connection between atmospheric electricity and diseases, and I am convinced that his conclusions are of great importance. I feel, therefore, that I am doing a service in bringing before the notice of readers of NATURE the following account of a paper, by Dr. Schliep, in Sonderabdruck aus Deutsche Medizinal-Zeitung.