TO PREVENT COLDS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 41, 18 February 1931, Page 13

TO PREVENT COLDS

A PINCH OF SNUFF

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 2nd January. Doubtless purveyors of snuff will be gratoful.for/thc correspondence that has appeared in "The Times" on a practice thsit seems to have largely gono out of fashion. "Tho Common Cold" was the title of an article in "The Times" on 27th December. Mr. G. Buekston Browne, F.R.C.S., followed this up with a letter in which he advocated "a pinch of snuff." "What we want," he wrote, "is a prophylactic or preventive, at once handy and agreeable, and that I believe we have in a pinch of snuff. After years of observation I'am satisfied that the danger of infection, and even of a chill, is reduced to its minimum if, on winter nights, when retiring, we take snuff freely, clear the nose well, and bathe the face in warm water. If this be not done every night, it should certainly bo done after sitting in any crowded assembly or carriage. The nasal circulation is stimulated, congestion relieved, mucus flows freely, and poisonous matter is washed away. Incidentally, the mucous membranes of the eye and inner ear participate in tho mucous flow, and these organs are benefited." FOR HAY FEVER, Sir James MacLeod, who was previously Consul-General of Tunis, confirms and supplements this statement. "Many years ago,.at Fez," ho says, "a medical friend of mine, Dr. Greig, arrived suffering, for the previous three months, with hay fever, and had 'tried everything ho know' to get rid of it. At my suggestion, although with some incredulity, ho took a big pinch of Moorish snuff beforo each expected recurrence of tho fever. Within 36 hours his trouble disappeared. Subsequently, he wrote to me from New Zealand that ho had since prescribed snuff in such cases to his patients, and tho results had been most satisfactory. His theory was that sneezing was Nature's effort to drive out the germs of the fever, and that the extra sneezing induced by tho snuff ensured this being done promptly, thoroughly, and permanently." Mr. W. Douglas Reid, of Bolcombe, Sussex, makes another suggestion. He states that he ia in his eightieth year, and almost entirely free from colds. "My good fortune," he says, "is undoubtedly attributable to a habit contracted from the South Sea Islanders GO years ago. It was both preventive and cure, simple, and, I think, t general. When a Kanaka felt a cold coming on ho got one of his friends to tickle his nose with perhaps a feather or a straw, and ho was kept sneezing violently until he could no longer stand the! tickling process. Then he was cured, or 'on tho way'; and I have stood the test when necessary on my own nose, with the desired result. My friends are never tired of predicting my 'death of «old' because I do not mind tho weather. But it seems likely they will need some other means of accomplishing that mournful event."