Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/387

Rh and account for, such sicknesses as croup, diphtheria, pneumonia, measles, scarlet, typhus, typhoid, rheumatic, "malarial," and other fevers.

I have already remarked that the condition of disease produced by an unhygienic mode of living, relating chiefly to food and air, and whose occasional ebullitions are observed in the "well-known symptoms of cold," forms the basis of most sicknesses by whatever name they are known. "I catched cold in the first place, and kept adding to it, some way, I couldn't tell how, and finally it settled on my kidneys" (or lungs, throat, face, limbs, or whatever organ or locality seems especially affected). As the nearest to a panacea for all the physical ills of life, I would offer this: Take care of the colds and the fevers will take care of themselves. Whatever may be the origin of disease, or whatever may give rise to its manifestations, whenever these manifestations or symptoms are said to indicate a cold, the condition, as every intelligent physician well knows, is that of fever: the thermometer placed under the tongue shows at once that the temperature is above the normal. The patient may, usually does, have periods of chilliness; his first noticeable symptom is, very likely, a chill; and if at such a moment he happens to feel a puff of fresh air on his cheek he thinks that was the moment when he caught his cold! Possibly he might have been feeling a little too warm, and that "draught" did the business for him! Chills and fever, speaking in popular phrase (in reality it is all fever), indicate blood-poison, always. In its earliest stage, the patient, being perhaps wholly unaware of his condition, feels "too warm," and throws off coat or shawl; pretty soon he feels the reaction—the chill—and, thinking he has done a careless thing in removing the garment, replaces it; too late, alas! he has already caught cold!

"It is noteworthy as a curious yet easily explicable fact," says the "Lancet," "that few persons take cold who are not either self-consciously careful or fearful of the consequences of exposure." It is