Climacteric year

Authors on the subject include the following: Plato, Cicero, Macrobius, Aulus Gellius, among the ancients; as well as Argol, Maginus, and Salmasius.

They were also viewed, logically within the framework of ancient medicine and its ties to astrology, as dangerous years from a medical standpoint.

Marsilius Ficinus gives a foundation for the belief: he states that there is a year assigned for each planet to rule over the body of man, each in his turn.

[3] The astronomer Johannes Hevelius wrote a volume under the title Annus climactericus (1685), describing the loss he sustained in the burning of his observatory in 1679, which he considered climacteric because it was 49 years after the beginning of his observing career.

For astrologers, the discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781 confirmed what may have originated as the mundane observations of the ancients on living things.