Diseases > Domestic medicine

DOMESTIC MEDICINE. 275
immediately to bed after using it. Bathing the feet
in warm water, lying in bed, and drinking warm
water-gruel, or other weak liquors, will sooner take
off a spasm, and restore the perspiration, than all the
hot sudorific medicines in the world. This is all
that is necessary for removing a common cold; and
if this course be taken at the beginning, it will
seldom fail.
But when the symptoms do not yield to abstinence,
warmth, and diluting liqnors, there is reason to fear
the approach of some other disease, as an inflammation
of the breast, an ardent fever, or the like. If the
pulse therefore be hard and frequent, the skin hot
and dry, and the patient complains of his head or
breast, it will be necessary to bleed, and to give
the cooling powders recommended in the scarlet
fever every three or four hours, till they give a stool.
It will likewise be proper to put a blistering plaster
on the back, to give two table-spoonsful of the saline
mixture every two hours, and in short to treat the
patient in all respects as for a slight fever. I have
often seen this course, when observed at the beginning,
remove the complaint in two or three days, when the
patient had all the symptoms of an approaching
ardent fever, or an inflammation of the breast.
The chief secret of preventing colds lies in avoiding,
as far as possible, all extremes either of heat or cold,
and in taking care when the body is heated, to let it
cool gradually. These, and other circumstances
relating to this important subject, are so fully treated
of under the article Obstructed Perspiration, that it
is needless here to resume the consideration of them.
OF A COMMON COUGH.
A cough is generally the effect of a cold, which