ion to cold bathing, if we would harden ourselves fully against
taking cold, to which I should be glad to advert were it not foreign to
the plan I had formed, and the limits which, in this work, I have
prescribed to myself.

CHAPTER LXX.

FREEZING OUT DISEASE.

I am well acquainted with one man of Yankee origin, who formerly made it
a practice to freeze out his colds, as he called it. It is certainly
better to prevent them, as I have all along and always taught. But this
man's story is somewhat amusing, and by way of relief from our more
sober subject, I will very briefly relate it.

Whenever he fancied he had taken cold, he would go, at about nine
o'clock in the evening, in such diminished clothing as would render him
in a very little time, quite chilly, and remain out of doors, when the
weather would possibly permit, till he was almost frozen, and then come
in and go immediately to bed, and procure a reaction. This he called
freezing out his colds. Whether it was the cold or the heat that
restored him, may be a point not yet fully settled; but it was a
well-known fact to his friends, though they insisted in protesting
against the practice, that every vestige of his cold would frequently,
if not always, immediately disappear.

But it was a method of treatment which, as the event proved, was not
without its hazards. I met with him a few years since, and on inquiring
whether he continued to be as successful as formerly in freezing out his
colds, he replied that for some time past he had not tried the plan,
for, on a former occasion, after many successful experiments, he had
failed in one, and had concluded to relinquish it. He made no farther
confessions for himself, but his friends have since told me that in the
case he faintly alluded to, he came very near dying under the process.
He was sick with a fever, as the consequence, for a long time.

A man in one of the Middle States, who is himself about half a
physician, and who has in various ways done much for his fellow-men as
a philanthropist, is accustomed to pursue a course of treatment which,
though slightly related to the former, is, nevertheless, founded on
principle. He keeps the sick in a room whose temperature is very
low,--little, if at all, above the freezing point,--in order that they
may inhale a full supply of oxygen. For every one doubtless knows that
the colder the air, the denser it is, and consequently, the greater the
absolute quantity o