CATCHING COLD.
IF any considerable medical man wants to bring his name before the public, let him publish in the Times, or any journal of great general circulation, a series of sound rules for pre- venting those who will follow them from taking cold. No danger is more serious in England, as the returns of mortality for the last two weeks amply prove ; there is none that physicians can do so very little to cure, except of course by regimen, of which the sufferers are impatient; and there is none against which the popu- lation of all classes is more reluctant to take precautions. The teaching of a quarter of a century has taught the middle-classes some elementary truths about hygiene, and they have, as a rule, a vague idea that bad drainage produces typhoid, that wet feet are not good for consumptive people, that cleanliness in the home is desirable, that whitewashing is a good disinfectant, and that the skin is the healthier for plenty of water, but they know very little more. We should not say they knew that much, were it not that an alarm of cholera, or an outbreak of typhoid, or a burst of scarlet fever seems to bring out in their minds a sort of latent knowledge, which they always possessed, but contrived not to remember until the pressure became too severe to be resisted. They do know a little, moreover, about bad smells, and something of the effect of drinking, and a little about heat-apoplexy, but of precaution against cold they not only know nothing, but are ex- tremely disinclined to learn. They dislike " catching " colds, of course, and grow depressed, and stupid, and ill-tempered when they have caught them; but they look upon colds as mis- fortunes which must come, and which do not signify, and if urged to take precautions, regard the adviser, even if a professional man, as slightly effeminate, or as they express it, very much given "to coddling himself." It does not strike them that a cold wave kills as many people as a burst of cholera. Because strong children survive a daily bath in cold water, they think cold water "hardens" children in winter as well as summer ; and because air and exercise are excellent things, they assume that fog is air and a long walk in a drizzle beneficial. If they are getting on in years, they may admit that they like warmth and good fires, but they are wholly unaware that healthy warmth means not only a warm temperature—say, 64° Fahr.—but a temperature steadily maintained at that height either by fires or clothes. The very use of a thermometer to regulate the tempera- ture of a room seems to be unknown in most houses, and you will see sedentary men sitting in a room for hours with a fire which brings the temperature up to 70°, and then for hours more with the fire nearly out and the temperature at 52°, or lower. They know, we suppose, that a sudden fall of eighteen degrees will kill off men of low vitality in hundreds, will give, perhaps, a third of mankind a " touch of the liver," and will inflict on half the remainder an " influenza " nearly as annoying and almost as dangerous as a fever, but once indoors, they fail to realise their knowledge. Even when the circulation is weak and the old are aware that cold is their enemy, they will go from a heated library to a chilly dining-room, quite unaware that they might as well go into a cold bath ; and having done it, will scold their daughters for throwing off their wraps while heated from a ball,—no doubt a dangerous practice, but not a bit more so than the sudden changes in which the scolders habitually indulge. This contempt for the thermometer, the only trustworthy guide in fire-making, is positively perverse, and so is much of the popular notion about " hardening." The basis of that notion, as entertained by the middle-class—the working poor are wiser, because they are educated by the acute pain of rheumatism—is that the worse the weather, or at all events the colder the weather, the more it hardens you,—an assertion which, when true at all, is only true of persons with exuberant vitality and unusually high circulation. For the average man or woman in this country, exposure to the weather during eight months of the year may have a bracing or otherwise beneficial effect—indeed it must have on all but a limited class—but during the remaining four months the loss is as great as the gain; and for the old, for children, and for persons of low vitality is probably greater. Agricultural labourers are far from being a healthy or long-lived class of the community, nor do policemen, who are out in all weathers and well fed, enjoy any marked immunity from disease. To the old and to children warmth is life, as indeed it may broadly be said to be to every- body, chilliness injuring all alike, though in different degrees. It is chilliness which the English seem not to understand. They will sit, not in the air, but in draughts of the bad kind—draughts, for example, such as come under badly-fitting doors in railway carriages—with the utmost indifference, and put themselves straight in front of a fire which would not draw if it were not constantly replenished by a stream of colder air. Hermetically sealed rooms are of course injurious, but that admitted fact is no proof that a stream of cold air on a hot skin must- be beneficial. The same ignorance governs much of English practice as to clothing. The anxious mother will protect her child's chest with a care which, if he is not consumptive and wears flannel, he probably does not want., and then let him run to school in shoes which, if they keep out the wet, do not, when he is seated, keep out the deadly chill arising from the thoroughly wetted sole. Many a child, and woman too, would be safer- walking with bare feet through wet grass than walking in London in shoes supposed to be water-tight. They are not cold-tight, and it is not water on the sole of the foot or anywhere else which harms people, but the chill which the water induces, and which is as injurious through the sole of the foot as through the chest or loins. The equableness of temperature which is so valuable in a room is just as valuable out-of-doors, and can be secured only by warm wool, or thinner wool covered with the most efficient enemy of chilliness, a wash-leather vest, which is impenetrable to draughts. It may be doubted if fur is by any means so good a protection as it is sometimes imagined to be. It keeps up the circulation when the thermometer is fax below zero, and is there- fore invaluable in very cold climates ; but in England fur heats the wearer too much, requires to be worn constantly, and unless the rooms are very warm superinduces chilliness indoors. This . point is disregarded by the men who wear fur, almost as much as care of their extremities is disregarded by women, who cover their bodies with sealskin jackets, while their legs are protected by silk and flannel worn too far from them .to be protectors, and their feet by boots which in summer do not keep them from the wet and in winter do not keep them from the cold. No dress can do less to keep up equable temperature, and none is less in accord- ance with the teaching of nature, which has enabled some beasts to shed their coats in warm weather, but has not enabled them to put them off when they retire to their nests. The fox does not undress himself in his hole, any more than the bear when he gets into his hollow tree.
A change of diet according to weather is of course nearly hopeless. An Englishman will sometimes drink port instead of claret in winter, because he is glad of the excuse, or because he- does not know that claret is improved by being slightly warmed ; but he will not reflect that food, and especially meat, is more wanted in winter than summer, that an Esquimaux keeps out cold by blubber as well as bear-skins, and that if a man goes through the same amount of exercise, an extra meal a day in winter will, unless he already strains his digestion, do. him no harm whatever. On the other hand, an extra quantity of hot drink, such as tea, the effect of which is to diminish the heart's force, will do him no good, but rather harm, more especially if he is not a man living habitually in the open air. We are not, of course, arguing that an Englishman of ordinary health should be always watching the thermometer, or should at- tempt to live by rule, or should sacrifice to mere living the things without which life is worthless. But he might make his life more worthy as well as more comfortable by attending to a few broad rules for avoiding colds which at present he habitually neglects,
and which may be reduced to two easily-remembered principles.. The secret of temperature is even warmth, to be secured by clothing and regulated fires ; and it is chill, not cold, general chill or local chill, which encourages disease. Perhaps we may be allowed to add a third. In England two classes of persons understand the hygiene of cold, and only two,—doctors, and people who suffer frequently from face-ache and from rheumatism.
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