Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1879 — An Injurious Practice. [ARTICLE]

An Injurious Practice.

The practice of eating snow and ice, so common among the school-children of the Northern States, is a frightful cause of catarrh. It is common to see boys and girls devour a snow-ball as though it were an apple, or an icicle as eagerly as a bit of candy. The hard palate which forms .the roof of the mouth also forms the floor of the nostrils, and is no thicker than pasteboard. The chilling effect of snow and ice brought freely in contact with this thin partition, the upper covering of which is a sensitive secreting membrane, made up almost wholly of fine blood-vessels and nerves, produces a congestion, often succeeded by chronic inflammation. As a consequence, these snow and ice eating boys and girls almost always have “colds in the head” and running noses. This is the foundation and origin of one of the most disagT9eable, persistent and incurable affections to which the people of the North are subject nasal catarrh. Catarrh is said to lead to consumption. Whether this is so or not, the chilling of the nasal membranes, a part of whose function it is to warm the air in its passage to the lungs, cannot but injure those organs, particularly in people of a delicate constitution.— Rural New Yorker.