Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/173

Rh itself, but there is a wide difference between a proximate and an original cause. A man can be too tired to sleep and too weak to be Kick. Bleeding, for the time being, may "break up" an inflammatory disease; the system must regain some little strength before it can resume the work of reconstruction. The vital energy of a person breathing the stagnant air of an unventilated stove-room is often inadequate to the task of undertaking a restorative process—though the respiratory organs, clogged with phlegm and all kinds of impurities, may be sadly in need of relief. But, during a sleigh-ride, or a few hours' sleep before a window left open by accident, the bracing influence of the fresh air revives the drooping vitality, and Nature avails herself of the chance to begin repairs, the lungs reveal their diseased condition, i. e., they proceed to rid themselves of the accumulated impurities. Persistent in-door life would have aggravated the evil by postponing the crisis, or by turning a temporary affection into a chronic disease. But in a plurality of cases Nature will seize even upon a transient improvement of the external circumstances: a cold night that disinfects the atmosphere of the bedroom in spite of closed windows, a draught of cool air from an adjoining room, or one of those accidental exposures to wind and weather which the veriest slave of the cold-air superstition can not always avoid. For, rightly understood, the external symptoms of a disease constitute a restorative process that can not be brought to a satisfactory issue till the cause of the evil is removed. So that, in fact, the air-hater confounds the cause of his recovery with the cause of his disease. Among nations who pass their lives outdoors, catarrh and scrofula are almost unknown; not fresh air, but the want of it, is the cause of countless diseases, of fatal diseases where people are in the habit of nailing down their windows every winter to keep their children from opening them. "In one such den," says Dr. Bock, "I was so overcome with nausea that I could not speak till I had knocked out a pane of glass. That is about the best thing one could do in most sick-rooms"—except knocking out the whole window. The only objection to a "draught" through a defective window is, that the draught is generally not strong enough. An influx of fresh air into a fusty sick-room is a ray of light into darkness, a messenger of Vishnu visiting an abode of the damned. Cold is a disinfectant, and under the pressure of a high wind a modicum of oxygen will penetrate a house in spite of closed windows. This circumstance alone has preserved the lives of thousands whom no cough-sirup or cod-liver oil could have saved.

—Fever-and-ague, being eminently a summer disease, could not very well be ascribed to cold air; but the antinaturalists, still resolved to find an extraneous cause, have selected as their scapegoat the only kind of natural food and drink most Christians ever touch in summer-time—fruits and cold water. The police of fever-stricken towns prohibit the sale of fresh fruit; fever-patients