190 CATCHING COLD. 



It may seem a little contradictory that tempo- 

 rary local heat should produce cold, but it is 

 nevertheless true, in that as well as in other cases. 

 How soon a person who has been in too close a 

 room, or too near the fire, gets cold and shiver- 

 ing, compared with one who has been in a colder 

 apartment, at a greater distance from the fire, or 

 in the open air. Half the colds and coughs, with 

 which people are annoyed in the winter, are owing to 

 their winter habitations being too warm; and those 

 complaints are far more frequent in towns than in 

 the open places of the country.. When people go 

 hot into the cold air, the evaporation from the 

 surfaces of their bodies is so rapid, as not only 

 to make them feel cold and shiver, but, if it be 

 long continued, to injure the little follicles of the 

 skin, which, in the healthy states of the body, re- 

 move much of the waste matter that is unfit for 

 the purposes of life; and thus that matter remains 

 in the system, and acts as a poison. Washing 

 with warm water in cold weather has much the 

 same effect ; and they who resort to that in order 

 to avoid the temporary influence of the cold, 

 thereby subject themselves to it for the whole day. 

 In summer, warm water is a luxury, and a whole- 

 some, and almost immediately a cooling luxury ; 

 but they who would escape chilblains and frost- 

 biting should avoid it in winter. 



The temporary warmth of the air, which melts 

 the hoar frost, acts in a similar manner. As the 

 spiculse of ice thaw (and very little heat thaws 

 them, as they are in small needles to which the 

 air has access on all sides,) the water evaporates, 

 and soon takes as much heat from the atmosphere 

 as cools that more than ever ; and the cooling influ- 



