When coughing drowns the parson’s saw
Farewell, the merry, merry month of May. Most of it, in my case, was taken up in catching a cold, feeling it concrete-up my nose, torch and lacerate my throat, twist and file down my bronchial tubes until they performed a fiendish symphony of wheezy discords, and steal into my lungs, where it kept me fretful and sleepless at nights, fighting for each shallow breath. Temperature? Up and down. Treatment? Antibiotic pills, three times a day. Cough, cough, cough. I thought of poor Kitty, silliest of Mrs Bennet’s five daughters, who aggravates her mother’s distress at her husband’s failure to call on their rich, young, male and unmarried new neighbour. ‘Don’t keep coughing so, Kitty, for heaven’s sake! Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.’ ‘Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,’ said her father. ‘She times them ill.’ ‘I do not cough for my own amusement,’ replied Kitty, fretfully.
The word ‘cold’, meaning ‘an inflammatory condition of the mucous membrane of the respiratory organs’, is as old as the English language. There is a reference to someone dying of cold as far back as 1330, and the OED finds that phrases like ‘a crying cold’ and ‘a running cold’ were current in the Wars of the Roses. ‘Iff thow have cold in thi hede’ occurs in 1450, when Henry VI was founding Eton and King’s. John Wesley genteely termed the process ‘obstructed perspiration, vulgarly called catching cold’. But quite how you got it was a mystery from the beginning, and still is. The virus I have, or had, is, according to one doctor, not contracted by human contact. Another says it is ‘highly infectious’. One says there are about 200 different viruses going the rounds. Another computes the total at ‘over 1,000’. Inadequate clothing or standing in an east wind were blamed long before the end of the Middle Ages. In 1494 one English sufferer blamed his cold on ‘goying barefote’ on pilgrimage. There were more ingenious explanations in Shakespeare’s time. In Henry IV Part Two, when Falstaff is recruiting conscripts by courtesy of his old friend Mr Justice Shallow, Peter Bullcalf begins to roar even before he is pricked, and on Falstaff demanding an explanation, shouts: ‘O Lord, Sir, I am a diseased man!’ ‘What disease hast thou?’ asks the sceptical Falstaff. And Bullcalf replies: ‘A whoreson cold, Sir; a cough, Sir, which I caught with ringing in the King’s affairs upon his coronation day, Sir.’ But Falstaff is having none of that: ‘Come, thou shalt go to the wars in a gown. We will have away thy cold, and I will take such order that thy friends shall ring for thee.’ Colds, then, were matter for joking even in the 16th century, and remained so, as the little episode involving Kitty from Pride and Prejudice shows. When Mr Bennet reveals that he has called on Mr Bingley after all, and that his ‘four or five thousand a year’ are within reach of his daughters, Mrs Bennet’s ‘tumult of joy’ is so riotous that her husband cannot refrain from telling his cold-stricken girl: ‘Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you chuse.’ Jane Austen did some coughing on her own account, following a visit in 1808 to the Reverend Edward Cooper and his family in Staffordshire. This philoprogenitive clergyman had eight children, all of whom developed whooping cough during Jane’s visit, and she succumbed to it herself a few weeks later. But in general Jane Austen rarely complains of colds in her letters. She enjoyed excellent health, which makes her succumbing to Addison’s Disease (now easily treatable) at the age of only 41 all the more tragic.
It was a different matter with Dickens, a great man for catching colds and keeping them; and an even greater man for dosing them with powerful slugs of alcohol. On his second visit to America he got a cold or cough which lingered with him for months. He tried to subdue it first with what he calls a ‘brandy cocktail’, terming it ‘a highly meritorious dram’. This was succeeded by another concoction taught him by ‘my New York landlord’, who called it a ‘Rocky Mountain Sneezer’. It consisted of a mixture of any spirits available, seasoned with bitters, lemon and sugar, and crowned with snow, which had to be freshly gathered just before the drink was made. Dickens told his English friends: ‘You can only make a true sneezer when the snow is lying on the ground.’ However, the champion cold-catcher and nurser of the Victorian age, by far, was Jane Welsh Carlyle. Her husband was no amateur when it came to bewailing his ill health, and caught colds regularly, whether in Chelsea or Craigenputtock, filling about a quarter of the space in his letters with his litanies of complaints. But he was nothing compared with his wife. If he caught a cold she would promptly catch one too, and indeed often forestalled him by getting in her self-inflicted blow first. Among close couples in the 19th century, there was a good deal of competing ailmentflourishing. Charles and Mary Lamb each liked to have some kind of disturbance on the boil, ready to be served up piping-hot in their letters. But Jane Carlyle was the most notorious cold-catcher in literary history. Combing through the 29 volumes so far published of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, I have so far counted more than 30 occasions on which she complained of suffering from colds, usually combined with racking coughs and ferocious headaches. Carlyle’s brother Alexander, a doctor, thought she was putting it on, and seems to have refused to prescribe medicine or listen with any sympathy. Husband and wife were undoubtedly competing in proclaiming their sniffling miseries. A curious element in the struggle was Lady Ashburton, who made Jane jealous by her obvious passion for Carlyle, and her constant invitations to the Grange, her grand house in Hampshire. To what extent Carlyle reciprocated her devotion remains a mystery, like so many things to do with his emotional life, but his letters to her are effusive and sometimes a little shamemaking. Jane retaliated by developing a cold whenever a visit to the Grange became imminent. Or, if she actually went there, she would collapse into an attack the moment they arrived, and spend the time in bed. This, oddly enough, brought out a cold in her ladyship, on a highly competitive basis. Jane’s colds, moreover, were not only highly emotional but prolonged. Six weeks, two months, were nothing. Some lasted an entire winter. And so into the modern age, with Virginia Woolf, Carrington and Lytton Strachey competing in the cold game.
Why can’t science kill the common cold once and for all? We have just learnt to clone humans but the colds from which they all suffer get worse and, increasingly, kill. Pam Ayres said it all:
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