242 THE BODY AT WORK 



mencement of the illness. The patient imagined that the 

 " chill " caused him to shiver, and that if he had not " caught " 

 it he would not have been ill. The substitution of the term 

 " cold " for " rheum," naming the malady after one of its 

 prominent symptoms, has done much to perpetuate this 

 superstition. " Chill " is a word we scarcely dare to mention. 

 When doctors could no longer attribute to witchcraft the 

 occurrence of disorders for which they had no other explana- 

 tion, they invented the luminous theory that inflammatory 

 diseases especially those of the stomach, liver, and lungs- 

 were produced by " a chill." At one time all diseases which 

 were not evidently infectious were caused by chill. The dis- 

 covery of germs and the recognition of their maleficent activity 

 has stripped this cloak of ignorance off almost every case ot 

 abnormal tissue-metabolism. It is recognized now that the 

 germ is the disease, not the effects which the germ produces. 

 Pneumonia is impossible in the absence of the pneumococcus, 

 however severe the chill to which the patient was exposed when 

 out in the cold and wet. Consumption is the effect produced 

 by the tubercle bacillus. If there are no bacilli, there can be 

 no consumption. Yet these two diseases illustrate the possi- 

 bility of the use of the term " chill " without impropriety. 

 The coccus of pneumonia may frequently be found in the 

 mouth of a healthy person. If everyone with whom the 

 tubercle bacillus has at some time come in contact were 

 inevitably its victim, no human being would be free from 

 phthisis, if any still survived. There are conditions of health, 

 or rather of unhealth, in which the economy is less resistant 

 than usual to the germs. Apparently the vaso-motor dis- 

 turbances of internal organs caused by ithe cooling of the 

 surface of the body, if it occur when health is otherwise de- 

 pressed, contributes to the production of such a state. 



The vaso-motor system is influenced by emotions. It is a 

 little difficult to express accurately the relation between 

 emotion and vaso-motor change. Some psychologists regard 

 the vaso-motor change as the emotion. " All emotions," says 

 a prominent exponent of this view, " are wholly due to excita- 

 tion of a particular kind of the vaso-motor centre." The person 

 about to be subject to an emotion of shame, anger, fear, disgust, 

 recognizes a fact or circumstance, or conjunction of circum- 



