Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/647

Rh ; brandy neither cures nor subdues dyspepsia, but merely interrupts it with a transient alcohol-fever. But, as soon as we ascertained that scrofula, or the "king's-evil," was not caused by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, but by bad food and foul air, the cure of the disease became easy enough; the king's-evil disappeared without the aid of the king.

That "colds," or catarrhal affections, are so very common—so much, indeed, as to be considerably more frequent than all other diseases taken together—is mainly due to the fact that the cause of no other disorder of the human organism is so generally misunderstood. Few persons have recognized the origin of yellow fever; about the primary cause of asthma we are yet all in the dark; but in regard to "colds" alone the prevailing misconception of the truth has reached the degree of mistaking the cause for a cure, and the most effective cure for the cause of the disease. If we inquire-after that cause, ninety-nine patients out of a hundred, and at least nine out of ten physicians, would answer, "Cold weather," "Raw March winds," or "Cold draughts," in other words, out-door air of a low temperature. If we inquire after the best cure, the answer would be, "Warmth and protection against cold draughts"—i. e., warm, stagnant, in-door air. Now, I maintain that it can be proved, with as absolute certainty as any physiological fact admits of being proved, that warm, vitiated indoor air is the cause, and cold out-door air the best cure, of catarrhs. Many people "catch cold" every month in the year and often two or three times a month. Very few get off with less than three colds a year; so that an annual average of five catarrhs would probably be an underestimate. For the United States alone that would give us a yearly aggregate of two hundred and fifty-five million "colds." That such facilities for investigation have failed to correct the errors of our exegetical theory is surely a striking proof how exclusively our dealings with disease have been limited to the endeavor of suppressing the symptoms instead of ascertaining and removing the cause. For, as a test of our unbiased faculty of observation, the degree of that failure would lead to rather unpronounceable conclusions. What should we think of the scientific acumen of a traveler who, after a careful examination of the available evidence, should persist in maintaining that mosquitoes are engendered by frost and exterminated by sunshine? Yet, if his attention had been chiefly devoted to the comparative study of mosquito-ointments and mosquito-bars, he might, for the rest, have been misled by such circumstances as the fact that mosquitoes abound near the ice-bound shores of Hudson Bay, and are rarely seen on the sunny prairies of Southern Texas. In all the civilized countries of the colder latitudes, catarrhs are frequent in winter and early spring, and less frequent in midsummer: hence the inference that catarrhs are caused by cold weather, and can be cured by warm air. Yet of the two fallacies the mosquito theory would, on the