headache I expect with it—and runs down
to the throat and joins the mucous
membrane that has lined the mouth, and they run
together down the windpipe to line all the
air-passages within the lungs, and down the
gullet to line the stomach and the channel
thence. Now, because I have chilled ray
skin, the mucous membrane is to suffer for it.
First, it gets dry and red—it swells and
causes me to feel, as you are used to say,
*' stuffed up." Next, a discharge will begin;
and I shall consider myself fortunate if the
catarrh in the nose does not run down into
the lungs, and make me cough and wheeze,
give me a touch, in fact, of bronchitis. In any
case, whatever else it may do, it always runs
down by the other road into my stomach,
and destroys my relish of my victuals. My
friend Whelks, who is an odd fellow,
generally catches a cold wrong side upwards.
Whenever he eats anything that plagues the
membrane in his stomach, that establishes a
rebellion along the whole line, up into the
nose and down into the lungs, so that he
catches cold over his dinner, when he eats
what would give you or me only a touch of
heartburn.

You, Mrs. Rummer, being an experienced
nurse, know very well how a cold like mine
should be treated. It should be fed with
spoon meat, kept in a warm room, and made
to perspire at night. After all fever has
departed, if the nursling should still linger in
existence, you would suggest choking it with a
rump-steak and a pint of port. A good dinner
and an extra glass of wine will make me, as
I have often heard you say on such occasions,
a free man. You are quite right That is
the sensible, old-fashioned, efficient way of
nursing a catarrh, which I commend to all
who can afford to stay at home. For, you
see, spoon meat and warm rooms only make
matters worse, if one is obliged to go to and
from them to one's daily business through all
manner of cold or damp, or among all manner
of draughts.

If I were a business man, or had to spend
much of my day behind the counter in a
draughty shop, I would certainly not treat
myself in this way. In that case I would try the
barbarous but effective method first suggested
by Dr. C. J. B.Williams, who advises, when you
catch cold, to baulk it at once. Cut away the
ground from under it. Let it have nothing to
go upon. Of course there cannot be a discharge
of fluid into the nose and lungs, unless such
fluid is first drawn from the blood; and the
blood again has to get it from the food. Let
all your food, therefore, be solid. Do not drink
a drop of anything. What follows? The
blood has a great many pulls upon its
resources, for all the natural and necessary
processes and secretions in the holy; such
demands must be met, and the result is, that
when the nose and lungs attempt to overdraw
their small account upon its bank for
muccus due, it is obliged to refuse payment.
I couldn't myself go without my coffee and
my tea: but when you next find that a cold
is coming, Mrs. Rummer, you, if you like, may
try the plan, and I believe you will find that
if you lose no time in beginning, forty-eight
hours of total abstinence from liquids of all
sorts will kill a cold entirely. Now, a man
who tries this remedy may go out into the
air, and the more the better. For the more
he walks and creates exhalations from the
skin, the more he robs his blood of water and
the more thoroughly he breaks the bank on
which the nose and throat and lungs rely for
the means of making themselves troublesome.

Mrs. Rummer, I have observed that when
you have a cold in the nose, you yourself are
always in the habit of calling it the Influenza.
No doubt, Mrs. Rummer, the influenza is a
catarrh; but then it is an epidemic catarrh;
and it is by no means always prevailing.  It
has raged only about a score of times during
the last three centuries; and after each
visitation, for some years individuals have
remained subject to isolated attacks, but that is
all. It is an epidemic, and a very strange
one. It is produced by some subtle influence
in the air; and the Italians therefore called
the whole disease the Influence, or Influenza.
The French call it the grippe. The old
doctors called it catarrh by contagion.
Certainly it is contagious; but that is not all.
True influenza not only includes in one
complaint the whole run of catarrh, with a more
than usual tenderness about the eyes, but it
is accompanied with an enormous depression
of the spirits and the vital energies.  You can
no more mistake the depression of influenza
for the depression of a cold than you can
mistake a well for a worm-hole.

The disease runs its course rapidly—a
previously healthy man is convalescent in a
week, but remains debilitated. A sickly man,
or an old man, it will often pull down to the
grave. The influenza of eighteen hundred
and thirty-seven was practically more fatal
than cholera; though not so apparently. Many
more died of it than die during a season of
cholera, but then the numbers attacked are
incomparably greater. Influenza will seize at
once half the population in a town; and if
they all get well again except one in a thousand
strong men, and a certain number of
the weakly, the mortality may still be very
alarming—greater than is caused by cholera,
which attacks only a few of us, but destroys
one of every two or three on whom it seizes.

There is no mistaking the existence of the
mysterious influence which causes this
disease. In the year eighteen hundred and
thirty-three it visited us. On the third of
April in that year, the day of its arrival, a
ship, the Stag, was coming up the Channel,
and at two o'clock arrived off Berry Head,
all on board well. There was an easterly
wind blowing from the land, and in half an
hour forty of the men were smitten with
influenza; by six o'clock, sixty were on the