"Do you know what it is to succumb to an insurmountable day mare—a whoresome lethargy—an indisposition to do anything—a total deadness and distaste—a suspension of vitality—an indifference to locality—a numb soporifical goodfornothingness—an ossification all over—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events—a mind stupor—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience?"
Charles Lamb groaned forth that question in the 19th century, but anybody in any epoch ought to be able to answer it with a simple yes. Anybody, that is, who has ever had a cold.
Even people who have never had a cold, if any there be, are pretty likely to know something about the peculiar miseries of the ailment. After all, nobody old enough to understand talk could easily avoid all knowledge of the cold: it is one disease that has never been discussed in whispers.
Quite the contrary. People, even when hoarse, tend to discourse clearly and repetitiously about the common cold. Cold victims routinely elucidate their suffering; those who are ordinarily laconic grow voluble, and the normally gabby become windy, lugubrious. With or without colds, people eagerly pass around whatever they possess of society's huge accumulation of folklore on the subject. (Benjamin Franklin was an archetypal expert on avoiding colds:
convinced that fresh air would do the job, Franklin once explained his theory so thoroughly to John Adams that he put the future President to sleep.) There are certain cold sufferers, true, who snuffle around telling everybody that the affliction is not as bad as it is cracked up to be, but their stoicism does not require them to talk any less about it.
As the new cold season now arriving will demonstrate, almost nobody suffers the common cold in silence. Yet very little can usefully be said on the subject, because the common cold remains a little black hole of a disease, ultimately obscure and myth-ridden. Science, to be sure, has learned a good deal about the cold. One unsettling modern discovery is that the invisible nature of the ailment is amazingly varied.
The common cold is in fact caused by 200 or so distinct viruses.
Medical science, of course, has not mastered the knack of immunizing against any of them. So the state of the art of cold prevention can be boiled down to a very few words based on the discovery that colds are transmitted person to person, most often by hand. The best, still imperfect cold avoidance program thus consists of washing the hands frequently when colds are about and keeping the hands away from the nose and eyes. The state of the art of curing the cold is simpler still: there is no cure. The adage holds: with proper treatment a cold can be ended in seven days, but otherwise it lasts a week.