Without fail, every twenty minutes or so, John Progress insists that the clothes on
the line are safe from rain because his lumbago isn’t acting up.
Besides it’s NOT going to rain today.
My lumbago isn’t acting up.
(Thunder)
Boy look at it come down!
Growing up, I didn’t know what lumbago was.
It sounded like an Italian pasta dish, or maybe a 1970’s era station wagon.
But neither of those made sense in the context of the Carousel of Progress.
Without knowing what it was or how it acts up, or how either would have anything to do
with the rain, I decided to find out.
So let’s look at the history and quirks of lumbago.
To offer a somewhat generalized and short answer, lumbago is lower back pain.
And in an interesting way, that generalized answer is probably the best answer, because
while it was once a catch-all term for any kind of lower back pain, the definition started
to shrink as the field of medicine improved and we started to learn all of the specific
and different ways a person could experience pain in that area.
Lumbago, as a term, is old.
Like, really old.
We’re talking 1,800 to 2,000 years old.
One of the more commonly cited sources was a man named Sextus Pompeius Festus.
He was a second century Roman grammarian which, to put simply, meant that he taught grammar
or “the correct way of speaking”.
Festus, during his career, wrote an abridged version of an earlier work called “De verborum
significatu” or “On The Meaning of Words”.
It was a 40 volume Latin dictionary written by a man named Marcus Verrius Flaccus.
That abridged version Festus wrote was 20 books long, which makes me wonder if Fetus
really knew what an abridgement was.
I mean I get that 20 books is less than 40 books, but it’s still 20 books.
Come on Festus!
While writing it, he took the liberty to pull out a few words that had already grown obsolete
and threw in a few words that he felt were missing.
His version contained the word lumbago, which was defined as “vitium et debilitas lumborum”
or “a defective condition and weakness of the loins.”
Now was that added in his version of the work or was it part of the original?
That’s hard to say, since the original work doesn’t exist anymore.
We have nothing to compare it to.
Eventually in the 8th century a historian named Paulus Diaconus further abridged Festus’
not-so-abridged version, and then later in the 16th century Diaconus’ work was discovered
and published.
And so, lumbago survived on as a term and eventually worked its way into the medical lexicon.
It evolved some, and by the early 19th century lumbago was defined as “pain or rheumatism
in the loins.”
As wild as it sounds today, it took some time before people began to realize and accept
that such back pain was caused by physical trauma to the back.
Like many ailments, there was a belief that it was caused by forces outside of their control
and unrelated to the actions they took.
It would take the industrial revolution, particularly the spread of railroads, and the unfortunate
spike in work related injuries that followed to finally paint the picture that too much
stress and injury on the back could cause lumbago.
And even then, that didn’t stop others from claiming that there were different causes.
Here’s a kidney pill ad that claimed that the prevalence of lumbago amongst firefighters
was caused by how wet they’d get on the job.
But hey, don't worry firefighters. Take those kidney pills and you'll be back in action in no time!
Alright, but about about all that rain nonsense.
How would John use his back pain to predict the weather?
Well, the legend has less to do with the rain itself, but instead the drop barometric pressure
that comes along right before it rains.
Many believe that such a drop causes the back pain to flare up, creating this supposed super
power to know when the weather is about to turn.
So is it true?
Well, probably not, but the legend still persists to this day.
Multiple studies have been done to try and get to the bottom of the myth, with results
pointing in both directions.
In 2007 a study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that among 200 patients,
knee pain was reported to increase when barometric pressure increased.
Now, 200 patients is a pretty small sample size, but if we accept these results, it actually
lines up with John Progress and what he has to say.
This study linked the pain increase to an increase in barometric pressure, but typically
the barometric pressure decreases before it rains.
So it would make perfect sense that his lumbago wouldn’t act up right before the storm.
In 2014 the American College of Rheumatology published a study that concluded that there
was no connection between weather conditions and musculoskeletal pain.
Also musculoskeletal sounds like a villain in a comic book.
A few years later a 2017 Harvard study, perhaps the largest on the subject by tracking 1.5
million patients over four years, also concluded that local rain didn’t impact joint or muscle pain.
But even that study concedes that there still might be an association, since they just tracked
doctor visits and weather, and realistically most people aren’t going to go to the doctor
for some back pain they’re used to.
The study, as well as others, mentions that “the persistence of this belief may reflect
the tendency of people to perceive patterns where none exist.”
They might remember the times that their back pain lined up with the rain and forget the
times it didn’t.
Or they might know rain is on the way and end up paying more attention to what they
feel in their back.
It could also be possible that perhaps some specific types of back pain are more sensitive
to those changes than others.
Ultimately the jury is still out.
John Progress’ lumbago line is perfect.
The Carousel of Progress was built with the intention of capturing a snapshot of what
American life was like throughout the 20th century, and it did.
People suffered from back pain, and they called it lumbago, and they were often raised to
believe that it would flare up before it rained.
It was lore that has lived on, so much so that even today we don’t fully know for
sure how true it is or isn’t.
I guess except in this case.
In this case we know that John was 100% wrong.