THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 629 



tions ; brandy neither cures nor subdues dyspepsia, but merely inter- 

 rupts it with a transient alcohol-fever. But, as soon as we ascertained 

 that scrofula, or the " king's-evil," was not caused by a mysterious 

 dispensation of Providence, but by bad food and foul air, the cure of 

 the disease became easy enough ; the king's-evil disappeared without 

 the aid of the king. 



That "colds," or catarrhal affections, are so very common — so 

 much, indeed, as to be considerably more frequent than all other dis- 

 eases taken together — is mainly due to the fact that the cause of no 

 other disorder of the human organism is so generally misunderstood. 

 Few persons have recognized the origin of yellow fever ; about the 

 primary cause of asthma we are yet all in the dark ; but in regard to 

 " colds " alone the prevailing misconception of the truth has reached 

 the degree of mistaking the cause for a cure, and the most effective 

 cure for the cause of the disease. If we inquire-after that cause, ninety- 

 nine patients out of a hundred, and at least nine out of ten physi- 

 cians, would answer, " Cold weather," " Raw March winds," or " Cold 

 draughts," in other words, out-door air of a low temperature. If we 

 inquire after the best cure, the answer would be, " Warmth and pro- 

 tection against cold draughts " — i. e., warm, stagnant, in-door air. 

 Now, I maintain that it can be proved, with as absolute certainty as 

 any physiological fact admits of being proved, that warm, vitiated in- 

 door air is the cause, and cold out-door air the best cure, of catarrhs. 

 Many people " catch cold " every month in the year and often two or 

 three times a month. Very few get off with less than three colds a 

 year ; so that an annual average of five catarrhs would probably be an 

 underestimate. For the United States alone that would give us a yearly 

 aggregate of two hundred and fifty-five million " colds." That such 

 facilities for investigation have failed to correct the errors of our exe- 

 getical theory is surely a striking proof how exclusively our dealings 

 with disease have been limited to the endeavor of suppressing the 

 symptoms instead of ascertaining and removing the cause. For, as a 

 test of our unbiased faculty of observation, the degree of that failure 

 would lead to rather unpronounceable conclusions. What should we 

 think of the scientific acumen of a traveler who, after a careful ex- 

 amination of the available evidence, should persist in maintaining that 

 mosquitoes are engendered by frost and exterminated by sunshine ? 

 Yet, if his attention had been chiefly devoted to the comparative 

 study of mosquito-ointments and mosquito-bars, he might, for the rest, 

 have been misled by such circumstances as the fact that mosquitoes 

 abound near the ice-bound shores of Hudson Bay, and are rarely 

 seen on the sunny prairies of Southern Texas. In all the civilized 

 countries of the colder latitudes, catarrhs are frequent in winter and 

 early spring, and less frequent in midsummer : hence the inference 

 that catarrhs are caused by cold weather, and can be cured by warm 

 air. Yet of the two fallacies the mosquito theory would, on the 



