ACTION OF COLD APPLICATIONS. 
205 
of cold are due essentially to the general excitation or invig- 
oration it produces on the nervous system. The various re¬ 
sults thus effected by cold external applications have been 
admirably described by Dr. Whittier, in his address at the 
annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, 1890. 
The following are among the most important of these : 
an improvement of innervation of the circulatory, digestive, 
respiratory and excretory organs, with a lessening of tissue 
waste. The failing digestive functions are reinvigorated, 
general nervous irritability is relieved by the action of the 
cooled blood on the nervous centres, in coursing through the 
brain, and a general tonic and stimulating effect upon the 
nervous system is in this way brought about. 
But lest in advocating too strenuously this antipyretic 
remedy, we are accused of basing our conclusions on purely 
hypothetical reasoning, let us now turn to the practical re¬ 
sults afforded by it. Are we not immediately confronted by 
statistics, in the domain of human medicine, mounting up 
into the myriads of cases, proving the vastly superior merits 
of this kind of treatment ? And this, too, not only in the 
treating of typhoid and other continuous fevers, but even in 
the case of pneumonia and kindred affections, which are es¬ 
pecially unsuitable for such treatment, in the eyes of the laity, 
and, indeed, of many professional brethren, because forsooth ! 
these diseases are said to result from cold, an entirely irrele¬ 
vant and unphilosophical conclusion, allowing that their pre¬ 
mises are correct. 
Cold doubtless predisposes to catarrhal and pulmonary 
disorders, but it is extremely questionable whether it is the 
primary factor often, and the manner of “ catching cold ” is 
a very different matter from the mode of giving it remedi- 
ally. Dr. Fenwick, in an analysis of one thousand cases of 
pneumonia treated in the London hospital, finds that the 
mortality when cold was used, in one form or another, to be 
only ten per cent as against twenty three per cent with the 
employment of any other method of treatment. The num¬ 
ber of cases treated with cold was one hundred and eight. 
Considering the close pathological connection which in¬ 
fluenza has in relation to pneumonia, how the former tends 
