“He doesn’t die of the cold,” insisted the old lady. “He catches the cold and dies of something else.”
“If I take a dose of poison,” the Health Master mildly propounded, “and fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?”
“It’s no parallel,” said Grandma Sharpless. “And even if it is,” she added, tacitly abandoning that ground, “we’ve always had colds and we always will have ‘em.”
“Not with my approval, at least,” remarked the Health Master.
“I guess Providence won’t wait for your approval, young man.”
“Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,” smiled the physician. “We’re all predestined to the ailment, and therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?”
“No, it isn’t! This is a green December and it means a full churchyard. We’re in for a regular cold-breeding season.”
“Nonsense! Weather doesn’t breed colds.”
“What does, then?”
“A very mean and lively little germ. He’s rather more poisonous than the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn’t as bad a name. In grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by getting all through the system and weakening its resistant powers, thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis, or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system, turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: ‘Come on in, fellers. The door’s open.’