Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 60, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1917 — Cost of a Cough. [ARTICLE]

Cost of a Cough.

A patient German statistician has calculated that a patient who coughs once every quarter of an hour for ten hours expends energy equivalent to twn fffty. units- of heat, which may be translated as equivalent to the nourishment contained in three eggs or two glasses of milk. In normal respiration the air is expelled from the chest at the rate of four feet per second, whereas in violent coughing it may attain a velocity of three hundred feet. This waste of energy is especially important, because it occurs, for the most part, in persons whose assimilative functions are already working under difficulties; consequently the Ingestion of the corresponding quantity of nourishment by no means Compensates for the exertion. It follows that persistent cough is per se a cause of emaciation, though there are many other factors which tend in the same direction; hence the desirability of restraining cough within safe limits, especially when it is due to irritative reflexes, such as are excited by laryngitis dnd pharyngitis.— From the Medical Critic and Globe.