Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/172

160 other means; and at any rate the possible danger of a climatic disease is preferable to the sure evils of the poison-drug. But how can noxious stimulants be distinguished from wholesome drinks? Tonic medicines, stimulating beverages, and poisons, are synonymous terms. Every known poison can become a lusted-after stimulant by forcing it repeatedly upon the (at first) reluctant stomach. It is true that the hankering of an old habitué after his tipple resembles the craving of a hungry man for food, but that constitutes no reproach against Nature, for the taste of the first drink betrayed the poison. To the palate of a child narcotic stimulants are bitter, alcohol is burning-acrid, tobacco nauseous, mineral poisons either bitter or insipid. By a liberal admixture of sugar and milk the repulsiveness of various narcotic decoctions can be diminished, but in no disguise could they be possibly mistaken for nourishing substances if the natural-depravity dogma had not weakened our confidence in the testimony of our instincts.

—The influence of anti-naturalism is most strikingly illustrated in our superstitious dread of fresh air. The air of the out-door world, of the woods and hills, is, par excellence, a product of Nature—of wild, free, and untamable Nature—and therefore the presumptive source of innumerable evils. Cold air is the general scapegoat of all sinners against Nature. When the knee-joints of the young debauchee begin to weaken, he suspects that he has "taken cold." If an old glutton has a cramp in the stomach, he ascribes it to an incautious exposure on coming home from a late supper. Toothache is supposed to result from "draughts"; croup, neuralgia, mumps, etc., from the "raw March wind." When children have been forced to sleep in unventilated bedrooms till their lungs putrefy with their own exhalations, the materfamilias reproaches herself with the most sensible thing she has been doing for the last hundred nights—"opening the windows last August when the air was so stiflingly hot." The old dyspeptic, with his cupboards full of patent nostrums, can honestly acquit himself of having yielded to any natural impulse; after sweltering all summer behind hermetically closed windows, wearing flannel in the dog-days, abstaining from cold water when his stomach craved it, swallowing drugs till his appetite has given way to chronic nausea, his conscience bears witness that he has done what he could to suppress the original depravity of Nature; only once the enemy got a chance at him: in rummaging his garret for a warming-pan he stood half a minute before a broken window—to that half-minute, accordingly, he attributes his rheumatism. For catarrh there is a stereotyped explanation: "Catched cold." That settles it. The invalid is quite sure that her cough came on an hour after returning from that sleigh-ride. She felt a pain in the chest the moment her brother opened that window. There is no doubt of it—it's all the night-air's fault.

The truth is, that cold air often reveals the existence of a disease. It initiates the reconstructive process, and thus apparently the disease