The medical side of Benjamin Franklin / by William Pepper.

  • William Pepper
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical side of Benjamin Franklin / by William Pepper. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    121/202 page 73
    is the frouzy, corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn, and books long shut up in close rooms, obtains that kind of putridity, which occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, and turning over such bedclothes or books, and not their coldness or dampness. From these causes, but more from too full living, with too little exercise, proceed in my opinion most of the disorders which for about one hundred and fifty years past the English have called colds. As to Dr. Cullen’s cold or catarrh a frigore, I question whether such an one ever existed. Travelling in our severe winters, I have suffered cold sometimes to an extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold. And, for moisture, I have been in the river every evening two or three hours for a fortnight together, when one would suppose I might imbibe enough of it to take cold if humidity could give it; but no such effect ever followed. Boys never get cold by swimming. Nor are people at sea, or who live at Bermudas, or St. Helena, small islands, where the air must be ever moist from the dashing and breaking waves against their rocks on all sides, more subject to colds than those who inhabit part of a continent where the air is driest. Dampness may indeed assist in producing putridity and those miasmata which infect us with the disorder we call a cold; but of itself can never by a little addition of moisture hurt a body filled with watery fluids from head to foot. With great esteem, and sincere wishes for your welfare, I am, Sir, Your most obedient humble servant, B. Franklin. In the following Franklin reiterates his views on the same subject, that is colds, but adds a little vital statistics. West Wycomb, the Seat of Lord Le Despencer. Sept. 25, 1773. To Thomas Percival.1 . . . The Difference of Deaths, between 1 in 28 at Manchester, and 1 in 120 at Morton, is surprising. It seems to show the Unwhole- someness of the Manufacturing Life; owing perhaps to the Confinement in small, Close Rooms, or in larger with Numbers, or to Poverty and 1 Thomas Percival, 1740-1804. A popular English medical and moral writer, practiced in Manchester and was the founder of the Philosophical Society in that city.
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