COLDS. A MILD winter may or may not make a green
churchyard. That is a bitter and endless controversy upon which nothing will induce us to enter. Of one thing, however, we are sure,—a mild winter doubles the nation's consumption of handkerchiefs, and makes the fortune of washerwomen. Just now every one either is in the full swing of a heavy cold, or has just recovered from, or is beginning to have one,—wondering, that is, whether this horrid feeling is "only an ordinary cold or a malign form of influenza." For some reason difficult, if not impossible, to discover, colds are considered, by those who have not got them, somewhat in the nature of a joke. Yet in reality they are the curse of mankind. There is no malady which for the time so completely spoils and demoralises one's existence as the ordinary cold. Diseases which have a specific name, such as lumbago, gout, rheumatism, neuralgia, and a hundred others, have a touch of dignity which to some extent mitigates the infliction, or at any rate secures sympathy. One feels ashamed to expect or to give sympathy for an ordinary
cold. The misery must be borne in silence, but, alas, not in solitude, for the man or woman who shuts himself or herself up because of a cold soon wins the very unpleasant name of a.
malcule imaginaire. 'When he has only got a cold in the head he sulks like a bear, thinks he is going to die, and won't even see his wife and children. Isn't it extraordinary that a clever [or strong, or young, or healthy, as the case may be] man like that should get into such an awful state of mind over a trifling ailment. It only shows how far people can carry self-indulgence and the worship of luxury.' These are the sort of things a respectable citizen does not like to have said about him, but they are the things that are certain to be said if he tries to nurse a cold in solitude and silence. No, the thought of any talk about self-indulgence and the worship of luxury when one's handkerchief "reading" has risen to six a day, when one cannot taste one's food, when one's throat and palate are too sore to smoke, and when one has a general sense of squalor and sordidness, is too much. It is better to face the world than be accused of a self-indulgence which it is physi- cally impossible to practise. The man with a cold finds, then, that practically he must resign the rights of illness and go about his business as usual. He may sometimes have a sneak- ing desire to try old Brown's remedy of stopping in bed for two days and drinking a pint of dry champagne three times a day, "or oftener if no relief is experienced after the first six hours of treatment," but he puts it from him with a sigh. If he is either the head or one of the branches of a large family, the man with the cold is indeed expected to be witty, or at least facetious, on the subject. For example, though he knows quite well that it is black-currant, his role requires him to ask people to pass him the " plub jab," and if he can be humorous about his remedies, and sneeze in a dramatic or titanic manner, it is accounted to him for righteousness by his relations. Of course nobody really likes to play the fool when he is feeling like "a buttered mummy." Yet so strong is the sense of duty in man, so keen the desire bred in all of us to do what England expects us to do, that ninety men in a hundred garnish a cold with a sort of dismal buffoonery, and regularly let off certain well-worn and woeful jocularities every time they catch a catarrh.
But in spite of this mockery of glee, the fact remains that even the best-tempered of men feel a sense of deadly exaspera- tion when they realise that they have caught cold. The sense of "I am in for a week's unmitigated misery" stings like a whip. Men who would not dream of shaking their fists in the face of fate over a serious illness show an ugly and stubborn bitterness about a simple cold which is most remarkable. The reflex action of this bitterness is shown in the frantic, though of course quite fruitless, efforts to stave off an impending cold, or to prevent catching one. This fact did not escape Mr. Stevenson, who noted so many human traits. He makes Morris in "The Wrong Box," in the very crisis of his fate and when his mind should have been intent upon nothing but how to commit forgery without detection, declare with fiendish vigour that come what may he will not catch a catarrh. Again, the poor wretch in "Weir of Hermiston," who is being goaded gallowswards by the implacable Judge, is struggling to keep off, or down, a cold by a miserable "piece of dingy flannel" round his throat. It is indeed this human touch which finishes Archie and makes him feel so intensely for the criminal. The criminal in "Weir of Hermiston" was no exception. It is, we believe, by no means uncommon for condemned men to be most careful not to take cold, so great is the dread implanted in mankind of catching a cold. But though there breathes not the man who is not intensely anxious to avoid catching cold, the doctors are strangely and inhumanly indifferent to colds in the head. They may care very much about the consequences of a cold, but colds themselves—at least so it seems to the lay- man—they heartily despise. Whoever heard of a young doctor making a name in the profession by a magnum opus on " Colds : their Pathology and Treatment" F The doctor feels apparently that it is below his dignity to deal with anything so paltry. His duty is to preserve life, and not to stop a running at the nose or an all-overish feeling, which will be gone the day after to-morrow. "I must bear with inconveniences till they fester into crimes," says Burke somewhere, and so the doctors bear with ordinary colds till they fester into bronchitis, pneumonia, and other deadly diseases. Meantime the great dumb public has a deadly sense of grievance against the profession because they allow colds to exist. Is there not a story told of an irate old gentleman who, having only , ordinary cold, sent to the family doctor, and expla'lf all him, "Sir, I have not sent for you because I vajority but mPrely to tell you what I think of your iv of the I wish to bring home to you that the continnedAie custom colds is a deep diggrace to you and the sci,e necessars:e- tend to have mastered. For fifty centuatorcement more men have had colds, and yet the doetavening re done nothing to stop them. Becar ,r(rm them interest- ing, you busy yourselves with emselves, have.adly diseases which affect only some ten or that High cat. of mankira, and leave the majority to the "Ev.ecir Possibly the ld gentleman overstated the casmakeF.."`the fact remains hat doctors think so little about colcIP that it is difficult to retrain a feeling of satisfaction when one\ sees a doctor with r heavy nasal catarrh. The thought surges the brain, '.thaps he at last is beginning to think that it migii.6*- beforth while to spare for colds a little of the care and study now devoted to such complaints as " Woolsorter's Disease" or the other and obscurer maladies of the medical dictionaries. Seriously, it would surely be well worth the while of some doctor to run down the ordinary cold, to discover its exact nature, and if possible to find a remedy. Mankind has too long endured the plan of doing nothing scientific, and everything un- scientific, for a cold till it has become something else. The world is weary of its snufilings and sneezings, and would like, as Mr. Gladstone used to say, to come to close quarters with the subject.
It is a curious fact that" The Miseries of Human Life," that great and memorable book in which the minor miseries of
existence are set forth with an analysis so complete that each reader finds in it what he thought before was his own pet per- sonal and private misery, contains little or nothing about colds. There are, indeed, only two direct references, and these not half as witty and penetrating as usual. Apparently the author found the subject too serious. The after-miseries of a cold are, however, described with all the author's verve and spirit. Here is Misery 12 of "Personal Miseries" "The state of your mouth at the winding up of a tremendous cold—your lips being metamorphosed into two boiling barrels totally disqualified for the functions of eating, speaking, laughing, gaping, or whistling." Another indirect reference -&31.s ..forth the misery of "rashly confessing that you have a slight 'cold in the hearing of certain elderly ladies of the faculty, who instantly form themselves into a consultation upon your case, and assail you with a volley of nostrums, all of which, if you would have a momrt's peace, you must solemnly promise to take off before night---Ily.sugh well satisfied that they would retaliate by taking you off before ruerring." The passage suggests the endless subject that is opened out by the attempt to cure a cold. Nothing shows man's uncon- querable mind more clearly than the way in which he persists in attempting to cure his colds. He never succeeds, but the next cold finds him quite as hopeful as before. He changes or doubles the dose, hopes on, and thinks the new or augmented remedy will really succeed. Yet the new remedy is falser than the last :— "Lies worse, and when we think we shall be blest
With some new joy, cuts off what we possesst."
That is, it professes to stop the running at one's nose, and instead merely cuts off the absence of headache which had before marked one's colds. In truth, remedies for an ordinary cold are of two kinds. There are the remedies which have absolutely no effect at all, and only sometimes appear to do good because we sometimes take them when we have not got colds. Then there are the remedies, like opium or sulphonel, which simply suspend and postpone a cold. The opium takes away the cold and our energies, mental and bodily, but when the effect is gone, and our vitality returns, so does the cold. Suspension is not care. Still, so strong is the desire implanted in the human breast to suggest a remedy for colds that we will give one, though the writer began this paper by showing that it was a remedy which every right-minded man would scorn to use. If one could go to bed, and stop there for two whole days the moment one felt a cold coming -on, having at the same time plenty of good and nourishing food and a moderate amount of wine, in all probability the .cold would have gone on the third day. But of course this suggestion is really worthless. Though a man may go to Brighton for a cold, or, indeed, for nothing, he must not by t to bed for one. There is n an T no reason for it. All one can -0,
) doubt of the fact, even if there
c ipaving a cold, and to letting a then, is to submit to a. interpreted, means till it eitlin.
it run its course, which, being . bed goes, or develops into some- thing which will justify . santime it
a consolation, accodi sif sissy or may not be g to men's temperaments, to know tft.e, if we 4i32E13 use it, there is a remedy even for a cold. An aCQSal, when it is ill, likes to lie quiet in a safe hole or corner Lill it is well. This is, in fact, the simplest and best of all treatments,—the bed treatment.
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