 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
CURING A COLD.
IT is a good thing, perhaps, to
write for the amusement of the
public, but it is a far higher and
nobler thing to write for their instruction,
their profit, their actual
and tangible benefit. The latter is
the sole object of this article. If it
prove the means of restoring to
health one solitary sufferer among
my race, of lighting up once more
the fire of hope and joy in his faded
eyes, of bringing back to his dead
heart again the quick, generous
impulses of other days, I shall be
amply rewarded for my labor; my
soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian feels when he has
done a good, unselfish deed.
Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no man
who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of fear that
I am trying to deceive him. Let the public do itself the honor to read my
experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then follow in my
footsteps.
When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my
happiness, my constitution, and my trunk. The loss of the two first-named
articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without a mother
or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to remind you, by putting
your soiled linen out of sight and taking your boots down off the mantel-piece,
that there are those who think about you and care for you, is easily obtained.
And I cared nothing for the loss of my happiness, because not being a poet, it
could not be possible that melancholy would abide with me long. But to lose
a good constitution and a better trunk were serious misfortunes. On the day
of the fire my constitution succumbed to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion
in getting ready to do something. I suffered to no purpose, too, because the
plan I was figuring at for the extinguishing of the fire was so elaborate that I
never got it completed until the middle of the following week.
The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my feet in
hot water and go to bed. I did so. Shortly afterwards, another friend advised
me to get up and take a cold shower-bath. I did that also. Within the hour,
another friend assured me that it was policy to “feed a cold and starve a fever.”
I had both. So I thought it best to fill myself up for the cold, and then keep
dark and let the fever starve awhile.
In a case of this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty heartily; I
conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his restaurant that
morning: he waited near me in respectful silence until I had finished feeding
my cold, when he inquired if the people about Virginia City were much afflicted
with colds? I told him I thought they were. He then went out and took in
his sign.
I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another bosom
friend, who told me that a quart of salt water, taken warm, would come as near
but I tried it anyhow. The result was surprising. I believed I had thrown up
my immortal soul.
Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are
troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see the
propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it as proved
inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn them against warm
salt water. It may be a good enough remedy, but I think it is too severe. If I
had another cold in the head, and
there were no course left me but
to take either an earthquake or a
quart of warm salt water, I would
take my chances on the earthquake.
After the storm which had been
raging in my stomach had subsided,
and no more good Samaritans
happening along, I went on borrowing
handkerchiefs again and blowing
them to atoms, as had been my custom
in the early stages of my cold,
until I came across a lady who had
just arrived from over the plains,
and who said she had lived in a part
of the country where doctors
were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable skill in the treatment
of simple “family complaints.” I knew she must have had much experience,
for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty years old.
She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and
various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it every fifteen
minutes. I never took but one dose; that was enough; it robbed me of all
moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my nature. Under its
malign influence my brain conceived miracles of meanness, but my hands were
surrendered to a succession of assaults from infallible remedies for my cold, I
am satisfied that I would have tried to rob the graveyard. Like most other
people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I
had never revelled in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it. At the
end of two days I was ready to go to doctoring again. I took a few more
unfailing remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.
I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed in a
thundering base, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only compass my
regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of utter exhaustion,
and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my discordant voice woke me
up again.
My case grew more and more serious every day. Plain gin was recommended;
I took it. Then gin and molasses; I took that also. Then gin and onions; I
added the onions, and took all three. I detected no particular result, however,
except that I had acquired a breath like a buzzard's.
I found I had to travel for my health. I went to Lake Bigler with my reportorial
comrade, Wilson. It is gratifying to me to reflect that we traveled in
considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my friend took all his
baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype
of his grandmother. We sailed and hunted and fished and danced all
day, and I doctored my cough all night. By managing in this way, I made out
to improve every hour in the twenty-four. But my disease continued to grow
worse.
A sheet-bath was recommended. I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a sheet-bath,
notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it was. It was
administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty. My breast and back
were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a thousand yards of it) soaked in
ice-water, was wound around me until I resembled a swab for a Columbiad.
It is a cruel expedient. When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh, it
makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men do in the
heart. I thought my time had come.
Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp, and
came near being drowned. He floundered around, though, and finally rose up
out of the water considerably strangled, and furiously angry, and started ashore
at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with great asperity, that
“one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to get killed wid jis' such
dam foolishness as dis!”
Never take a sheet-bath—never.
Next to meeting a lady acquaintance,
who, for reasons best known to herself,
don't see you when she looks at
you, and don't know you when
she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
thing in the world.
But, as I was saying, when the
sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
a lady friend recommended the application
of a mustard plaster to my
breast. I believe that would have
cured me effectually, if it had not
been for young Wilson. When I
went to bed, I put my mustard plaster—which
was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square—where I could
reach it when I was ready for it. But young Wilson got hungry in the night,
and—here is food for the imagination.
After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and
beside the steam baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were ever concocted.
They would have cured me, but I had to go back to Virginia City,
where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I absorbed every day, I
managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and undue exposure.
I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the first day I got there, a lady
at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every twenty-four hours, and a
friend up town recommended precisely the same course. Each advised me to
take a quart; that made half a gallon. I did it, and still live.
Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration of
consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately gone
through. Let them try it: if it don't cure, it can't more than kill them.
| Mark Twain's sketches, new and old | |