o one is afraid of it. Call it a
"draft," and up go hands and eyebrows in horror at once. One of our
highest authorities on diseases of the lungs, Dr. Norman Bridge, has
well dubbed it "The Draft Fetich." It is a fetich, and as murderous as
Moloch. The draft is a friend instead of an enemy. What converted most
of us to a belief in the beneficence of drafts was the open-air
treatment of consumption! Hardly could there have been a more
spectacular proof, a more dramatic defiance of the bogey. To make a
poor, wasted, shivering consumptive, in a hectic one hour and a
drenching sweat the next, lie out exposed to the November weather all
day and sleep in a ten-knot gale at night! It looked little short of
murder! So much so to some of us, that we decided to test it on
ourselves before risking our patients.

I can still vividly recall the astonishment with which I woke one frosty
December morning, after sleeping all night in a breeze across my head
that literally made

Each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,

not only without the sign of a sniffle, but feeling as if I'd been made
new while I slept.

Then we tried it in fear and trembling on our patients, and the delight
of seeing the magic it worked! That is an old story now, but it has
never lost its charm. To see the cough which has defied "dopes" and
syrups and cough mixtures, domestic, patent, and professional, for
months, subside and disappear in from three to ten days; the night
sweats dry up within a week; the appetite come back; the fever fall; the
strength and color return, as from the magic kiss of the free air of the
woods, the prairies, the seacoast. There's nothing else quite like it on
the green earth. Do you wonder that we become "fresh-air fiends"?

The only thing we dread in these camps is the imported "cold." Dr.
Lawrence Flick was the first to show us the way in this respect as in
several others. He put up a big sign at the entrance of White Haven
Sanatorium, "No persons suffering from colds allowed to enter," and
traced the only epidemic of colds in the sanatorium to the visit of a
butcher with the grip. I put up a similar sign at the gate of my Oregon
camp, and never had a patient catch cold from tenting out in the snow
and "Oregon mists" until the small son of the cook came back from the
village school, shivering and sneezing, when seven of the thirteen
patients "caught it" within a week.

What will cure a