University of Virginia Library

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,
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
mantle-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 afterward, 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 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 curing a cold as any thing in the world.
I hardly thought I had room for it, but I
tried it any how. The result was surprising.
I believe I threw 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,

aqua fortis, 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 too feeble to execute them;
at that time, had it not been that my strength
had 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 reveled 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 death agony. It froze the
marrow in my bones and stopped the beating
of my 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'lman's nigger gwyne
to git killed wid jes' 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 ate it up. I never
saw any body have such an appetite; I am confident
that lunatic would have eaten me if I had
been healthy.

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,
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 Lick
House told me to drink a quart of whisky every
twenty-four hours, and a friend at the Occidental
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 them, it can't more than kill them.