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.

    127/202 page 77
    I thank you for your kind congratulations on our late successes and good wishes for the establishment of our liberty. I have the honour to be respectfully, Sir, Your most obedient humble servant, B. Franklin. In John Adams’ autobiography occurs a very humorous account of how Franklin never allowed a chance, to impress upon all his views on fresh air, escape him. It seems that John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were travelling together in 1776 and the diary reads, “At Brunswick, but one bed could be procured for Dr. Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window. The window was open, and I who was an invalid and afraid of the air of night, shut it close. ‘Oh,’ says Franklin, ‘don’t shut the window, we shall be suffocated.’ I answered I was afraid of the evening air. Dr. Franklin replied, ‘The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors. Come open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds?’ Opening the window, and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr. Cooper, in which he had advanced, that nobody ever got cold by going into a cold church or any other cold air, but the theory was so little con¬ sistent with my experience, that I thought it a paradox. However, I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that I would run the risk of a cold. The Doctor then began a harangue upon air and cold, and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together, but I believe they were equally sound and insensible within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep. I remember little of the lecture, except that the human body, by respiration and perspiration, destroys a gallon of air in a minute; that two such persons as we were now in that chamber, would consume all the air in it in an hour or two; that by breathing over again the matter thrown off by the lungs and the skin, we should imbibe the real cause of colds, not from abroad, but from within.” According to John Adams, it was the opinion of Franklin’s own physician, Dr. Jones, that he fell a sacrifice at last, not to the stone, but
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