Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/229

Rh seated a corpulent lady with full face, shrill voice, and labored respiration. The lady on the right was of lean, slender, dried-up figure; on entering the omnibus she had coughed; after taking her seat she held her handkerchief to her mouth and fairly changed color when the one opposite, wheezing, took her place and called out for "Air, air!" exclaiming that she would surely be smothered if the window were to remain closed. "But I," objected the other, "should get my death of cold if the window were opened." The conductor, who for some time stood undecided what to do, received this piece of Solomonic advice from one of the passengers: "Open the window," said he, in a deep voice, "and then one of them will die; then close it, and the other will die, and so at last we shall have peace."

This ending of the scene I state for completeness' sake only, and I add to it, by way of transition to the subject of the present essay, a conversation with a farmer which grew out of the occurrence.

On expressing to this sun-bronzed young man my regret that, in this self-styled "age of intelligence," the fear of colds and of draughts should be steadily increasing, and that it should really be producing the very effects it is meant to guard us against, namely, coughs and colds, he fully agreed with me, but took credit to himself for having risen above such notions. "We farmers," said he, "no longer believe that rust in grain comes from cold; for we know that it results from the development of noxious germs which, emitted by barberry-bushes and decaying stalks, are carried about by the wind."

This idea was of interest to me; for the farmer's account of the origin of "rust" put me in mind of certain throat and lung complaints that, developing unnoticed, gradually lead to positive disease, and the causes of which we physicians are daily more and more clearly tracing to inhalation of impure, vitiated air; hence, instead of speaking of consumptive lungs or tuberculous lungs, we should, rather, speak of "decayed" lungs or "dust" lungs. Stone-cutters are not assured by life insurance companies, because it is known that the stone-dust settles in their lungs, undermining them, producing ulcerations and reducing the average life of the men to thirty-six years. Other "dusty occupations," so to speak, are less dangerous, but of certain callings and of certain classes of working-men we often hear it said that they are seldom free from "dry" cough. The reader, though he or she may have little to do with dust, will perhaps have taken home from the ball a very fair case of "dust-lung" caused by the dust of the dancing-floor. If they will not believe this, let them examine their expectoration the day after the ball. He who has good lungs may without fear inhale dust; he will dance most of it out again; but not so a delicate girl, whose lungs are compressed in a tight corset: when with dust-laden mucus she spits blood, do not say she has "taken cold." No, it is heating that has caused it.

Heating, too, and not cold, far less "trouble with teeth," is to