There’s now another recent attempt to fathom Lovecraft’s possible and actual medical conditions, in the new dissertation “Understanding H.P. Lovecraft’s Anxiety Narratives through the Medical Humanities” (2023)…

“I argue that deciphering these writings as anxiety narratives will be giving a new insight about the author, as well as mental illness in general.”

For a Spanish university, in English. Free online, and under Creative Commons.

Interestingly, and somewhat in relation to this, I recently heard that the years 1908-11 are now deemed to have been the coldest years on record in the USA, a run which broke in the “notably fine summer of 1911” before the nation was plunged into the well-documented and bitter winter of the ‘1911–12 United States cold wave’. 1908 coincides quite well with the start of Lovecraft’s hermitage / mystery years of 1908-1916, and this makes me think that new attempts at diagnosis would necessarily have to closely consider the weather and temperatures of New England and also New York City.

The essay on the influence of the fluctuating seasonal temperatures on Lovecraft has yet to be written, I think. Or perhaps a timeline + graph might be a better format. Whatever the format, first one would have to track down the reliable non-‘adjusted’ data, ideally drawn from and referenced to primary data such as local newspapers of the period. I see there are now books on the history of New England weather, but they focus on the front-page headline events and have titles such as Mighty Storms of New England. I find that Lovecraft’s own favoured source, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, can only provide North Providence data back to 1945. Perhaps a Tentaclii reader knows where a good reliable and succinct week-by-week graph for pre-1938 North Providence might be had?