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cold, rhenmatisni. umlniia ami the like are timesavcrs. Sncli tenns are 

 often used both in tlie sense of cause and effect. 



Well, I don't see where I got my cold or caught my cold, the patient 

 will say. Well, I don't either, the physician may reply, while he writes 

 the prescription or puts up the bottle of medicine. In the meantime the 

 patient will mentally go over the events of the past few days until he 

 finds where, as he thinks, he has exposed himself to cold, perhaps to a 

 draught or went out bareheaded; and then he is able to account for his 

 illness or for his "cold." This is all very simple. 



Now, as a matter of fact the term cold as ordinarily understood as an 

 ailment, or even as a cause for an ailment, has practically gone out of use 

 among physicians themselves, and the word is seldom seen in the best 

 medical literature of today. 



But let us return to the popular use of the term. Colds in the human 

 body have a most varied form of manifestation. A cold in the head is 

 perhaps the most common. We often hear of colds settling in certain 

 parts of the body or of traveling about from one organ to another. A 

 cold which begins in the nose may travel down into the lungs or down 

 the alimentary tract. Affections Avith different names maj' follow, such as 

 catarrh, or tonsilitis, bronchitis or pneumonia, or congestion of the stom- 

 ach or liver or kidneys; we also hear of colds m the eyes and ears. 



Now a "cold" in the sense of a bodily ailment is by many of us in- 

 timately connected with cold in the physical sense, that is, the absence of 

 heat or a lessened amount of heat in the atmosphere. An ingenious ex- 

 planation that I once heard was this: A sudden alternation of heat and 

 cold acts on the mucous membrane as it does on glass — it causes it to 

 crack, and then disease results. This would be a simple explanation why 

 Indiana, with its great and sudden variations in temperature, is un- 

 healthy. 



Now, this sounds plausible, and yet we are told by arctic explorers 

 that they are singularly free from colds— and acute respiratory affections 

 generally— while in the far north, notwithstanding that they go from 

 their warm huts or cabins out into the intense arctic cold, where the 

 contrast is much greater than any changes in Indiana. It would seem 

 that if a cracking of mucous membranes takes place at all it would cer- 

 tainly take place there, and disease result. 



It is a common observation that colds are most prevalent among us 

 during the cold season, and so we naturally associate cold with "colds," 



