Part 65

“Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under the heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be respectable to die of a cold, would it?”

“He doesn’t die of the cold,” insisted the old lady. “He catches the cold and dies of something else.”

“If I take a dose of poison,” the Health Master mildly propounded, “and fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?”

“It’s no parallel,” said Grandma Sharpless. “And even if it is,” she added, tacitly abandoning that ground, “we’ve always had colds and we always will have ‘em.”

“Not with my approval, at least,” remarked the Health Master.

“I guess Providence won’t wait for your approval, young man.”

“Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,” smiled the physician. “We’re all predestined to the ailment, and therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?”

“No, it isn’t! This is a green December and it means a full churchyard. We’re in for a regular cold-breeding season.”

“Nonsense! Weather doesn’t breed colds.”

“What does, then?”

“A very mean and lively little germ. He’s rather more poisonous than the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn’t as bad a name. In grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by getting all through the system and weakening its resistant powers, thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis, or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system, turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: ‘Come on in, fellers. The door’s open.’

“With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without necessarily inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious ear-troubles come from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and the consequent necessity of quick operations to save the patient’s life. Almost any of the organs may be impaired by the activity of the little pest. And yet as intelligent a family as this”—he looked around the circle—“considers it a ‘mere cold.’”

“Why haven’t you told us before?” asked Mr. Clyde bluntly.

“A just reproach,” admitted the Health Master. “Not having been attacked, I haven’t considered defense—a wretched principle in health matters. In fact, I’ve let the little matters of life go, too much, in my interest in the bigger.”

“But what about Bettina?” said the mother anxiously.

“Let’s have her in,” said the Health Master, and the six-year-old presently trotted into the room, announcing through a somewhat reddened nose, “I’m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed me with goose-grease, and I don’d wand to take any paregoric.”

“Paregoric?” said the physician. “Opium? I guess not. Off to bed with you, Toots, and we’ll try to exorcise the demon with hot-water bottles and extra blankets.”

Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the circle, Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.

“Stop!” said the Health Master. “No kissing.”

“Not even my mamma?” queried the child. “I’m afraid not. You remember when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn’t allowed even to be very near any of you.”

“But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases, isn’t it?” asked Julia.

“Not as contagious as a cold in the head.”

“I don’t know how contagious a cold is,” said Grandma Sharpless; “but I do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes through it like wildfire.”

“Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That’s sheer carelessness.”

“Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,” contributed Charley.

“Why hasn’t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?” demanded the Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.

“Why—why, I didn’t think of it,” said she. “I didn’t think it was anything.”

“Oh, you didn’t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I should think your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.”