Weather as Destiny

Genius has had many odd explanations, but one of the oddest yet was advanced last week by an eminent Chicago pathologist. A onetime University of Illinois Medical School professor, William F. Petersen, offered the theory that an individual's chances of becoming a great man are greatly improved if he is conceived in a period of sunspot turbulence and foul weather. Dr. Petersen published a report called Lincoln-Douglas: The Weather As Destiny (Charles C Thomas, Springfield, Ill.; $3).

Dr. Petersen contrasts tall, gaunt, brooding Abraham Lincoln with short, broad, bustling Stephen Douglas. He points out that Hippocrates, father of medicine, observed that development of the embryo "is not the same for the same seed in summer as in winter nor in rain as in drought." Douglas, born of a placid, comfortable mother, was conceived during a peaceful Vermont summer, weighed 12 lb. (or more) at birth. He grew up in a snug, warm household, and his roly-poly build helped him withstand the buffetings of the weather. According to Dr. Petersen, the "broad type" is less upset by extremes of climate than the slender type because it is better "buffered" and presents a smaller surface to the elements. But because stocky people are less toughened by the world, they crack up more readily after 40, usually die younger than thin people. Douglas, true to form, was a U.S. Senator at 34, dead at 48.

Hardy Abe. Lincoln, the son of a lean, tired mother, was conceived during a bitter rainy spell at the end of an unusually hard Kentucky winter. All this, says Petersen, predisposed him to a lanky figure, active metabolism, fickle blood pressure and extreme sensitiveness to the environment. In the harsh winters of the Kentucky and Illinois wilderness, he grew up with strong inhibitions (developed to conserve his physical strength), tired, moody, sensitive to the weather and to men. In his sex life he was by turns passionate (he "could scarcely keep his hands off [women]") and inhibited. But the weather's buffetings also stimulated Lincoln, and his inhibited (i.e., civilized) personality was just what was needed by "a social order ... in travail." While Stephen Douglas cracked up, Abe Lincoln grew stronger with age: had he not been assassinated, says Dr. Petersen, he would have lived to be a hundred.

After the Storm. Warming up to his theory, Dr. Petersen quotes A. J. Beveridge to point out that Charles Darwin was born the same day as Lincoln, that Victor Hugo, Cavour, Disraeli, Dickens, Bryce, Thackeray and Bismarck were all born at about the same time. To support his idea that unsettled weather has something to do with it, he notes that a crest of great sun spot activity in 1778 was followed within a few years by a historic high point in mankind's production of geniuses, that the Golden Age of Greece coincided with an alltime high in solar turbulence.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.