Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Madness and the Moon
it is conceivable that man would be too. Many have always
thought so.
An old Cornish saying goes No Moon, no man. A baby
born when no moon was visible would not live to be adult.
In north-west Germany the Moon was regarded as a midwife,
because births were believed to be more frequent
when the tide was rising, just as many coastal inhabitants
believed deaths occur on the outgoing water. Are these old
wives tales?
Studies verify some of this. In a study of more than
11,000 births over a period of six years at the Methodist
Hospital of Southern California in Los Angeles, it was found
that six babies were born when the Moon was waxing(before
Full Moon) to every five born when it was waning(after
Full Moon). The same results were obtained in Freiburg,
Bavaria, by Dr W. Buehler after studying 33,000 births, with
the added refinement that boys tended to be born on the
wax and girls on the wane.
Does the Moon affect other bodily processes? Dr
Edson Andrews, a Florida ear-nose-and throat surgeon,
found 82% of his patients bled and needed urgent operations
around the time of the Full Moon. Dr F. Peterson
found that in his Chicago practice, tuberculosis sufferers
were more likely to die just after the Full Moon and least
likely on the 11th previous day, probably because of Mooninduced
changes in the acidity or alkalinity of the blood.
This is of interest in my family at least, as the mother of
my children, terminally ill with cancer, died on July 14th,
1995, two days after the Full Moon in perigee.
The Fiji military coup led by George Speight occurred
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