MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ALL those who, whether from stage or platform, have of late been faced with public audiences, will have observed that the British people, since October or November last, have been suffering from acute Coryza, or colds. It is not only that they snuffle quietly to themselves or that their voices, when raised in question, assume an adenoidal ring ; it is that from stalls to gallery, from boxes to dress circle, they exchange coughs as if they were mermaids calling each to each. It is indeed curious, when one is speaking, to observe how infectious is that act of coughing. One may have paused while a gust or paroxysm sweeps one's audience and then resumed in the lull that follows ; but even as one resumes, some zany in a box will, as an afterthought, emit one slight cough only ; immediately his intemperate act will be repeated in the gallery, and then in the stalls, and thereafter in the dress circle until the whole audience once again is swept by a choral gust of coughing. Heads shake, shoulders contract, hankerchiefs are extracted, and much communal suffering is observed. I am not a man such as Lord Montgomery, who is disconcerted, and indeed enraged, when his audiences cough. Such irritation as I might experience is excluded from my conscious- ness by the presence therein of a heavy load of apprehension. I am afraid that I shall cough myself. And when I say " cough " I do not mean merely a short dry cachinnation ; I mean that cruel paroxysm when the cough develops a carrying-through movement, when asthmatic expirations succeed each other inexorably, when the face turns purple, and when the resultant choking leads those around one to assume expressions of anxiety and disgust. No speaker need dread a neat little •cough here and there. What causes me such apprehension is that my own coughs turn into a whoop.
It is possible, when addressing a live audience, to still the resultant embarrassment by some neat quip or gibe. Even if the incident assume farcical proportions (as when one's hankerchief when ex- tracted is seen to consist only of a few ill-connected strips of linen or silk) a sense of comradeship can be evoked between the audience and oneself. But when one is addressing the microphone, such human communications are precluded. It is true that one is pro- vided in the studio with a small contraption containing a red lever ; when one depresses the lever one is sundered from communication with the outside world. People who possess a mechanical turn of mind could doubtless depress the lever while they cough and release it when they resume their discourse: I do not possess a mechanical turn of mind ; what I do is to depress the lever when I feel a cough coming and then release it when the full bronchial blast shatters my frame. The microphone, moreover, is an instrument which detects, and then exaggerates, any bronchial weakness. You can hear die vocal chords grating one against the other ; a paltry wheeze is magni- fied until it sounds like the north wind roaring through a railway arch ; the politest cough is enlarged into a bellow. All this is most disconcerting for any broadcaster. He feels the cough coming towards him as something approaching from the end of a vast corridor: if he takes a sip of water, the sound of glug-glug-glug echoes through an attentive world ; and the resultant panic makes him forget what he is saying and lose all contact with his script. There is no remedy for this unhappiness. There is no jujube, no pastille, French or English, which I have not assayed. I have even gone to the length of painting my throat with a long camel-hair brush dipped in glutinous substances. The tickle is always there.
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I have come to the conclusion that the medical profession know nothing whatsoever about the diseases of the nose and throat. Some new-fangled, or it may be cild-fangled, doctors have gone so far as to advance the absurd suggestion that my vocal chords would improve if I were to stop smoking fifty cigarettes a day. I have disproved this theory. In r94o I gave up smoking for a period of four horrible months. And although I admit that during this phase of abstinence my voice rang as clear and innocent as Bow Bells, yet the moment I resumed my fifty cigarettes a day that corn-crake note returned. One reads from time to time of experiments carried out in American universities for the purpose of discovering the causes and cure of the common cold. Batches of young men and women are segregated, inoculated and infected under the eyes of observers. And with what result? With the result that the doctors pronounce that the common cold is not due to any single micro- . organism, but to the presence of such varied enemies as the strepto- coccus, the staphylococcus, the pneumococcus and the many varieties of the influenza bacillus. The most they can say is that the common cold resembles hay fever and is due to "a hypersensi- tive condition of the nasal mucous membrane to some protein, probably bacterial in nature." All of which amounts to saying that many people commonly catch colds. I believe none the less that if one is very enterprising and alert one can sometimes stop a cold, when it first begins to tickle the nasopharynx, by applying one of the many patent remedies now upon the market. There are several brands of nasal drops which one squirts into the nostril through a fountain-pen filler. Each of these remedies is effective the firai time it is applied ; but one should change the brand each time,' And in the end there is nothing that remains to one beyond patience, manliness, aspirin and hot drinks.
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In Piers Plowman Langland writes of " crampes and tothaches, rewmes and radegoundes." I am not quite certain of the exact meaning of radegounde, but I suspect that my own affliction is neither catarrh, nor what old-fashioned practitioners call "smoker's throat?' but something in the nature of a radegounde. It is induced, I am convinced, by the dampness of the British climate and has become endemic in my case as I was born and bred in climates which were hot and dry. Hippocrates, for instance, was of opinion that it was the presence or absence of moisture which rendered people liable or immune to the common cold. Cities which were situated, as London is situated, in moist areas were especially ex- posed to catarrh. "The heads of the inhabitants," he writes, "are moist and full of phlegm, and their digestive organs are frequently deranged from the phlegm that runs down into them from the head." "When they are more than fifty years old," he continues, "they are paralyzed by catarrhs supervening from the brain when the sun suddenly strikes upon their heads, or when they catch a cold. These are their endemic diseases." Hippocrates also observed that after a very wet autumn, such as we have this year experienced, people were apt during the winter months to develop "hoarseness, colds in the head, coughs and in some cases consumption as well." It is thus evident that the father of medicine, the wizard of Cos, would agree with me that my radegounde is due, not to any undue indulgence in cigarettes, but to the fact that I spend most of my working life in the estuary of the Thames. All of which gives me hope, comfort, and a sense of personal guiltlessness.
This liability to catch colds, which is one of the major afflictions of the British people, is not, I think, due to our love of draughts. The inhabitants of New York, who live in a hot-house atmosphere, may suffer less than we do from the common cold, but they suffer much more than we do from sinus troubles. Moreover people who visit the Arctic or the Antarctic, or who expose themselves to the inclemencies of mountains, seldom wheeze or cough. What is wrong with us is that cold and heat, dryness and humidity are so unevenly distributed, that we pass constantly and suddenly from one to the other. Non-smokers such as Lord Montgomery, or doctors anxious to conceal the limitations of their own knowledge, may if they like attribute our English coughs to over-indulgence in cigarettes. But I Prefer the opinion of the father of medicine and to ascribe my wheeziness to the fact that I live in London on Thames.
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