If your own child develops a cold, if mild, keep him playing out-of-doors by himself; or if severe, keep him in bed, in a well-ventilated room, for three or four days. He'll get better twice as quick as if at school, and the rest of the household will escape.
When you wake with a stuffed head and aching bones, stay at home for a few days if possible, out of regard for your customers, your fellow-clerks, or your office force, as well as yourself. If one of your employees comes to work shivering, give him three days' vacation on full pay. If it runs through the force, you'll lose five times as much in enforced sick-leaves, slowness, and mistakes. Above all, don't go to any public gatherings,--to church, the theatre, or parties,--when you are snuffling and coughing. You are not exactly a joy to your beholders, even if you don't infect them. It is advisable, and well worth the trifling trouble and expense, to fumigate thoroughly with formalin all churches, theatres, and schoolrooms at least once a month. Reasonable and public-spirited precautions of this sort are advisable, not only to avoid colds themselves, which are disagreeable and dangerous enough, but because mild infections of this sort are far the commonest single means of making a breach in our body-ramparts through which more serious diseases like consumption, pneumonia, and rheumatism may force an entry.
Colds do not "run into" consumption or pneumonia, but they bear much the same relation to them that good intentions are said to do to the infernal regions. They release the lid of a perfect Pandora's box of distempers--tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatism, bronchitis, Bright's disease, neuritis, endocarditis. A cold is no longer a joke. A generation ago a prominent physician was asked by an anxious mother, "Doctor, how would you treat a cold?"
"With contempt, madam," replied the great man.
That day is past, and has lasted too long. Intelligently regarded and handled, they are the least harmful of diseases; neglected, one of the most dangerous, because there are such legions of them. To sum up, if you wish to revel in colds, all that is necessary is to observe the following few and simple rules:--
Avoid drafts as if they were a pestilence.