BAD AIR AND BAD HEALTH. 105 



stand at once why the leading symptoms of a cold are violent 

 flow from the nose, sneezing, coughing, with the accumulation of 

 phlegm, and painful soreness in the throat.* These symptoms 

 "become intelligible at once from the point of view of local poison- 

 ing, and we see in all the circumstances of a cold the " protective 

 efforts" which Nature makes to eject the poison of whatever 

 kind it may be from the parts which are specially attacked, just 

 as we often see in diarrhoea the effort to get rid of an irritant, 

 or' in fever, with its rapid disintegration of tissue, of the poison 

 that has attacked the system. Of course, as in pneumonia, some 

 slight chill often immediately precedes the attack of cold the 

 chill, by its arrest of skin action, throwing more poison into the 

 blood, which is sufficient to determine the attack in the predis- 

 posed part. 



We believe, therefore, that few healthy persons would be sub- 

 ject to cold, unless they lived in impure air. With an old person, 

 or a person in lowered health, it is different. A defective ma- 

 chinery for the circulation of the blood or for respiration might 

 readily result in the waste-poisons being imperfectly separated 

 from the blood, and thus such persons would live in the same state 

 of blood-poisoning and preparation for attack as a young and 

 healthy person does who constantly breathes bad air. Where we 

 have cases of liver or kidney attack following upon a severe chill, 

 we may suppose either that the poisons retained (or formed) near 

 the surface of the body pass into the blood, and then act through 

 the nervous centers upon those organs which happen to be spe- 

 cially susceptible ; or that the poisons, imperfectly breathed out at 

 the lungs, are carried directly to those organs. 



We wish that it were possible to follow the subject further, but 

 we have already overstepped the limits which the kindness of the 

 editor has allowed. We can only say, in conclusion, that we are 

 convinced that very grave issues are dependent upon the question 

 of pure air in our houses. We suspect that not only liability to 

 cold, but to gout, rheumatism, lumbago, neuralgia, some forms of 

 headache, and many forms of nervous irritation are to be con- 

 quered by constantly giving lungs and skin a fair chance of get- 

 ting rid of these poisons ; we feel sure that the irritable temper 

 that so often accompanies severe literary work, and at last 

 ends in the " break down/' must largely be put to the account 

 of the impure air breathed through long hours ; and we suspect 



* The fact that the air that we breathe is delayed for some little time in the bronchia 

 passages before reaching the lungs probably increases the local poisoning, and therefore 

 the predisposition for attack by the germ of the parts when we breathe bad air. In this 

 way perhaps the lungs are protected at the expense of the bronchial passages ; and a cold 

 is the violent occasional expurgation of those parts which are specially exposed to the 

 poison. 



