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The paucity of verified knowledge about colds could never deduced by anybody studying a typical cold season. Mere 'acts about the disease usually vanish into persisting clouds of folklore. The belief that dampness, chilliness and drafts cause colds, though debunked repeatedly in controlled experiments is still widely held—and energetically perpetuated by parents in cautioning children. "Don't get your feet wet, you'll catch cold." Even though medical research has long since shown that neither antihistamines nor any other medication can change the course of a cold, Americans spend some $1 billion a year on untold thousands of over-the-counter cold products.
Then there are the folk remedies. These are also beyond numbering, but include traditional notables like hot toddy, hot lemonade, chicken broth, regional potions like the South's horehound and pine-needle tea, and ethnic preparations featuring ingredients like honey, garlic and cayenne. Faith is widespread in the anticold potency of herbs like eucalyptus, mullein leaves, bloodroot and red clover. California Herb Specialist Michael Tierra commends a concoction of honeysuckle, chrysanthemum and licorice.
Perhaps the most popular new folk remedy of modern times is ascorbic acid, a.k.a. vitamin C. Ever since Nobel-Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling popularized this remedy in the 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, many people have become convinced that big doses of ascorbic acid help ward off or ameliorate colds; controlled experiments, however, have failed "to provide proof of the claim. Some folk remedies out of folklore (rub socks with onions, coat body with Vaseline) are hard to consider with a straight face, and a great many others irresistibly bring to mind Robert Benchley's personal anticold regimen: "Don't breathe through your nose or mouth."
It is easy to understand pre-Copernican beliefs in a flat earth and similarly easy to account for the accumulation of popular myths about the cold before the disease's viral nature became clear. But why do so many dubious beliefs persist in the face of new knowledge? The inertia of human prejudices is only part of the answer. An additional reason lies in the truth that a cold, typically, is far more than a mere medical event.
Were it only that, the public would deal with the cold with far less conversation, far less drama, and the cold sufferer would never have become one of the cartoonist's regular stock of sympathetic (and pathetic) figures. The fact is that over the generations the cold has grown to be, along with all else, a theatrical event, a psychological event, a social event—all transactions that would be undermined if people laid aside myths and paid too close attention to scientific truth.