Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/650

 632 affairs, minus the overcoat habitually worn; I have slept in winter in a current blowing directly about my head and shoulders; upon going to bed, I have sat in a strong current, entirely nude, for a quarter of an hour, on a very cold, damp night, in the fall of the year. These and similar experiments I have made repeatedly, and have never been able to catch cold. I became cold, sometimes quite cold, and became warm again, that is all" ("Natural Cure," p. 40).

There are many ways, less often sought than found, for "becoming quite cold, and warm again," but an experimenter, trying to contract a catarrh in that way, would soon give it up as a futile enterprise; after two or three attempts he would find the attainment of his purpose more hopeless than before; he would find that, instead of impairing, he had improved the functional vigor of his breathing-apparatus. Cold is a tonic that invigorates the respiratory organs when all other stimulants fail, and, combined with arm-exercise and certain dietetic alteratives, fresh, cold air is the best remedy for all the disorders of the lungs and upper air-passages. As soon as oppression of the chest, obstruction of the nasal ducts, and unusual lassitude indicate that a "cold has been taken"—in other words, that an air-poison has fastened upon the bronchi—its influence should at once be counteracted by the purest and coldest air available, and the patient should not stop to weigh the costs of a day's furlough against the danger of a chronic catarrh. In case imperative duties should interfere, the enemy must be met after dark, by devoting the first half of the night to an out-door campaign, and the second half to an encampment before a wide-open window. If the fight is to be short and decisive, the resources of the adversary must be diminished by a strict fast. Denutrition, or the temporary abstinence from food, is the most effective, and at the same time the safest, method for eliminating the morbid elements of the system; and there is little doubt that the proximate cause of a catarrh consists in the action of some microscopic parasite that develops its germs while the resistive power of the respiratory organs is diminished by the influence of impure air. Cold air arrests that development by direct paralysis. Toward the end of the year a damp, sultry day—the catarrh-weather par excellence—is sometimes followed by a sudden frost, and at such times I have often found that a six hours' inhalation of pure, cold night-air will free the obstructed air-passages so effectually that on the following morning hardly a slight huskiness of the voice suggests the narrowness of the escape from a two weeks' respiratory misery. But, aided by exercise, out-door air of any temperature will accomplish the same effect. In two days a resolute pedestrian can walk away from a summer catarrh of that malignant type that is apt to defy half-open windows. But the specific of the movement-cure is arm-exercise—dumb-bell swinging, grapple-swing practice, and wood-chopping. On a cold morning (for, after all, there are ten winter catarrhs to one in summer), a wood-shed matinée