Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1875 — Catching Cold. [ARTICLE]

Catching Cold.

A writer in aLondon paper says in regard to catching cold: The teaching of a quarter of a century has taught the middle classes some elementary truths about hygiene, and they have as a rule a vague idea that bad drainage produces typhoid, that wet feet are not good for consumptive people, that cleanliness in the home is desirable, that whitewashing is a good disinfectant, and that the skin is the healthier for plenty of water, but they know very little more. We should not say they knew that much were it not that an alarm of cholera, or an outbreak of typhoid, or a burst of scarlet fever seems to bring out in their minds a sort of latent knowledge which they always possessed but contrived not to remember until the pressure became too severe to be resisted. They do know a little, moreover, about bad smells, and something of the effect of drinking, and a little about heat apoplexy, but of precaution against cold they not only know nothing, but are extremely disinclined to learn. They dislike “catching” colds, of course, and grow depressed and stupid and ill-tem-pered when they have caught them; but they look upon colds as misfortunes which must come, and which do not signify, and if urged to take precautions regard Uie adviser, even if a professional man, as slightly effeminate, or, as they ex press it, very much given “to coddling himself.” It does not strike them that a cold wave kills as many people as a thirst of choleTa. Because strong children survive a daily bath in cold water they think cold water “ hardens” children in winter as well as summer; and because air and exercise are excellent they assume that fog is air and a long walk in a drizzle beneficial If they are getting on in years they may admit that they like warmth and good fires, but they are wholly unaware that healthy warmth means not only a warm temperature—-sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit —but a temperature steadily maintained at that height either by fires or clothes. The very use of a thermometer to regulate the temperature of a room seems to be unknown in most houses, and you will see sedentary men sitting in a room for hours with a fire which brings the temperature up to seventy degrees, and then for hours more with the fire nearly out and the temperature at fifty-two degrees or lower. They know, we suppose, that a sudden fall of eighteen 'degrees will kill off men of low vitality in hundreds, will give perhaps a third o! mankind a “ touch of the liver,” and will inflict on half the remainder an “ influenza” nearly as annoying and almost as dangerous as a fever, but once indoors they fail to realize their knowledge. Even when the circulation is weak and the old are aware that cold is their enemy, they will go from a heated library to a chilly dining-room, quite unaware that they might as well go into a cold bath, and, having done it, will scold their daughters for throwing off their wraps while heated from a ball —no doubt a dangerous practice, but not a bit more so than the sudden cnanges in which the scolders habitually indulge. This contempt for the thermometer, the only trustworthy guide in fire-making, is positively perverse, and so is much of the popular notion about “ hardening.” The basis of that notion, as entertained by the- middle class —the working poor are wiser, because they are educated by the acute pain of rheumatism—is that the worse the weather, or at all events the colder the weather, the more it hardens you—an assertion which, when true at all, is only true of persons with exuberant vitality and unusually high circulation. For the average man or woman in this country exposure to the weather during eight months of the year may have a bracing or otherwise beneficial effect—indeed, it must have on all but. a limited class—but during the remaining four months the loss is as great as the gain, and for the old, for children, and for persons of low vitality is probably greater. Agricultural laborers are far from being a healthy or long-lived class of the community, nor do policemen, who are out in ail weathers and well fed, enjoy any marked immunity fromdisease.

Mercurial Ointment in Boils and Carbuncles.— Dr. T. "Roth lauds, in the Deutsche Klinik, the local application of gray ointment in boils and carbuncles, especially the early stages. He anoints, the affected part with the ointment four times daily and thereby reduces the inflammation and Hbackens” the boil most satisfactorily. •