Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    444/896 (page 192)
    us more liable to receive the contagion of them if we are thrown in the way of it. But this influence of cold is shown chiefly by the extent to which it aggravates the severity, and increases the mortality, of almost all those complaints I have mentioned, by inducing complications and results which are often far more serious than the original disease. This is strikingly the case as regards the infectious diseases of childhood, such as measles, hooping cough, and scarlet fever. Simple enough ailments in themselves in the vast majority of cases, they become, chiefly by reason of their complications (which are principally in- flammatory affections of the lungs or kidneys), the causes of a terrible destruction of infant life, and are justly looked upon as the scourges of our families. These complications no doubt belong to, or form part of, the disease, and may appear despite the greatest care; but it is unquestionable that in a large pro- portion of instances they are justly to be ascribed to the in- fluence of cold, the tables of mortality of the Eegistrar-General showing how largely the death-rate from these diseases is increased in the colder months of the year, or when the temperature is low. I may be allowed to add my own confirmation of this, as the result of observations in the Fever Wards of the Eoyal Infirmary for a number of years past. But the evil is not to be measured alone by the extent of the mortality, for such complications, even if recovered from, but too often lay the foundation for future bad health, and careful medical enquiry can often trace back some disease occurring in later life to its origin in connection with one of the disorders of childhood. This is a fact which parents and those in charge of children would do well to ponder, and the practical lesson it conveys as to the exercise of the utmost care and watchfulness needs no enforcing. Eheumatism is another malady upon which the influence of cold is exhibited in a marked degree. Doubtless a rheumatic consti- tution is in many persons an unfortunate inheritance, but whether connected with this or not, the acute form of the disease, that which goes by the name of rheumatic fever, is in almost all instances traceable to a chill of the surface of the body produced by getting wet through, by long exposure to a cold wind, or by