MY ABOMINABLE COLD.

Evening Star, Issue 9472, 17 August 1894, Page 4

MY ABOMINABLE COLD.

A SNIFF AT MEDICAL MEN. I am in the gravest and most hopeless trouble. No, I have not lost a fortune, or a wife, or any of these things. Such, indeed, may be replaced, and even improved upon. My trouble touches me more nearly—l have a perennial cold. I have been to three doctors with my cold, and I learn with amazement that medical science cannot cure it. lam advised (confound, them ’.) to take care of my cold; I have given it several times to the rest of my family, but it is like the widow’s cruse of oil. One expert (F.R.0.P.) tells me of a method to employ directly one has taken cold, but that is no good to me, for I never knew when I took this cold. It declared itself rather than was taken; it began with a coup d'etat and convulsed me. I have had this cold now for more than two years. I fail to sec any good in a medical faculty that cannot deal with such a common trouble. It robs me of my belief in science. It is absurd for them to concern themselves with such exotic trivialities as cholera, hydrophobia, and all those mere transient affairs, while I am going about permanently a mere snuffling mockery of what I might be. Think of the world’s loss. You cannot imagine, unless, poor wretch ! you have oue, what a nuisance a well-established cold may become. Now it will raid down into my lungs, and now it will get up into my head and prevent my working for days together. In my sadder moods I sometimes think I would as soon be wiped out altogether, and have a shroud once for all as this incessant pocket handkerchief. At the best of times a nose is a needless encumbrance, but when it wants to bray or bust, so to speak, when you arc jammed between two irritable Wagnerians, it is a feature as hard nut to hate as an intimate friend. It interferes with all my conversation. It prevents my cutting any figure in politics —of which lam immoderately fond. It hampers the cultivation of my voice. I had, and may, for all I know, still have, somewhere in my recesses, a rather agreeable tenor voice. I would change this cold for any other burthen that a respectable writing person may suffer under, saving only my eyes and my right hand. I would take an orphan’s curse, or a murder on my conscience, or a bar sinister on my escutcheon—which at present is a field azure with nothing proper—or the most terrible and melodramatic concealed past that Miss Braddon could invent, or be answerable for the National Debt, or wear a blue ribbon, or join the Royal Academy and be held up to the execration of every sensible person. I don’t care. I want my cold cured. I know this is not cheerful reading, but who could keep out of thislbsenish vein with a cold like mine? People expect a journalist to be amusing over everything, to jest pleasantly over the top of his pocket handkerchief at his own disasters, to sit like Patience on an unsigned article smiling at Grief. I have done things like that in my time. A mere matter of the affections, a common sorrow, is passable in the way of copy. But my cold is above journalism and beyond a joke. I have never yet, and I hope I never may, scoff over this sorrow of mine. In plain harsh prose I propound my trouble. I have got a perennial cold, and in this so-called scientific age, with all its coruscation of ’ologies, I am no nearer a cure for it than if I were just an unpleasant, insanitary, Paheolithic man. For the medical schools in all the universities of England and Scotland, and for the Con joint Boards of London, I have nothing but anger, sorrow (snuffles), and contempt. It is no good medical men protesting; for a well established cold there is no hope of a cure.—Exchange.