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No cure for common cold
One of the prescriptions was for some nose spray with a fancy plastic bottle and the other was for some bright colored, two-tone capsules which cost six-bits apiece. One end, which had red stuff in it and the other end had blue stuff in it, which is probably what made 'em cost so much. The drug manufacturing houses try to make the capsules where they'll match your automobile. The pharmacist didn't seem to appreciate my remarks when I learned the cost. I'm not going to say the medicine and the shot didn't help me and I'll admit I got better in about two weeks. In fact, for the last 50-odd years I've been getting over colds, in about the same length of time and lots of 'em I never did spend a penny on trying to get 'em cured. This time, though, it might be that I would have come down with pneumonia or something if I had consulted my physician and insulted my pharmacist. You just can't tell about things like that. Kept going When I was little, colds didn't seem to amount to anything. That was when a germ was a germ and the doctor wouldn't have recognized a virus if he had seen one in the middle of the big road. We never lost a day from school on account of a common cold. We loaded up every pocket with a large-size handkerchief and when they got well saturated we started using our sleeves. I don't know that children would have done back in those days if shortsleeve sports shirts had been stylish. I do remember that my parents would become alarmed though, if any of us started coughing, which they considered on of the signs of approaching pneumonia. When this happened we would get a mustard plaster on our chests. The plasters didn't help the coughs any, but it gave Mama an excuse to use up some of the worn out nightgowns around the house. I still wonder where the mustard came from, because hotdogs hadn't been invinted. If we kept on coughing we were given generous doses of caster oil and I reckon anybody who has ever taken a dose of that vile-tasting, awful-smelling stuff shouldn't fuss about sixbit capsules. About 20 years ago, I decided that nothing could be done to bring hair back on the heads of bald men and now I've come to the conclusion that nothing much can be done to cure the common cold. Some of the drugs might bring a measure of relief, but it still takes 14 days to get over one. The pleasant remedy My Uncle Henry, back in the old days, had a remedy for a cold and every time he came to our house he was treating one. What he did at the first sniffle was to take a big drink of liquor every hour or two for the 14-day period. Uncle Henry was always scared of having a relapse so he kept it up for 14 extra days, just in case the cold tried to come back. He sure did dread taking a cold and toward the last, just before he took the delirium tremens, he was about as well inoculated as anybody you ever saw.
I wonder sometimes, if medical science wouldn't be making a big mistake if they should discover a sure-fire cure for colds. Personally, I get out of going to lots of things by claiming I'm suffering from a cold. Our churches wouldn't hold all the members and they would have to spend a lot of money enlarging the auditoriums. Druggists would have to go on relief and the doctors would have so much spare time there wouldn't be any fish left for me to catch. Office employees couldn't get an occasional day off to go to a baseball game, and people who often do shoddy work couldn't blame it on a cold. For instance, I could have written a better column this week, except that I've been suffering from a cold.
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