The Geographical Study of “Seasonal Diseases” (1)

Tentative Calendars of “Seasonal Diseases” in Japan

Abstract

It is well known that the occurrence of diseases and deaths is often connected with seasonal conditions, but there are not a few diseases which have little relationship with climatical and seasonal changes, and opinions differ among medical scientists as to the definition of seasonal diseases. In this paper, therefore, the author does not intend to discuss this point, but to present a tentative survey of death rates by disease and their geographical variations in prewar and postwar Japan. Thus, it is simply for sake of convenience that those diseases for which the death rates fluctuate seasonally are regarded as “seasonal diseases” in this paper, but the author believes that some facts found in the seasonal fluctuations of death rates by disease claim serious analysis and study from the standpoint of medical geography.