You would think that the common cold should be easy enough to study, but it is not as easy as it looks. Colds often seem to spread from one person to another, so it is often assumed that the cold must be infectious but there are some puzzling observations which do not fit with this theory. An investigator in Holland examined some eight thousand volunteers from different areas and came to the conclusion that in each group the colds all appeared at the same time. Transfer of infection from case to case could not account for that. Yet at the common cold research unit in Salisbury, the infection theory has been tested out; two series of about two hundred people each were inoculated, one with salt water and the other with secretion from known cold victims. Only one of the salt-water group got a cold compared with seventy-three in the other group.

  In the British Medical Journal the other day, there was a report of a meeting. ‘The Common Cold - Fact and Fancy’, at which one of the speakers reported a study of colds made in Cirencester over the last five years. Three hundred and fifty volunteers had kept diary records of their colds and on an average, each had seven every year with an annual morbidity of seven days. So nearly one-fiftieth of our lives is spent in more or less misery, coughing and sneezing. Some widely held beliefs about the common cold have turned out not to be true. It seems that old people are just as liable to colds as the young. Sailors in isolated weather ships have just as many colds while on board and not in contact with the outside world as when on shore. It is a truism that common illnesses pose more problems than the rare. The rare disease is by comparison much easier to handle. There are not so many cases and all of them have been intensively studied. Someone has read up all the literature about the disease and published a digest of it. There will be more facts and fewer fancies.

  Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show the absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last but quickly over; their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted and are like sick people’s attacks of hunger and thirst. They are hot-tempered and quick-tempered and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated. While they love honour, they love victory still more, for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this. They love both more than they love money which indeed they love very little not having yet learnt what it means to be without it. They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily because they have not yet been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood as though with excess of wine and besides that, they have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation for youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one’s life, one has nothing at all to remember and can only look forward. They are easily cheated owing to the sanguine disposition just mentioned. Their hot tempers and hopeful dispositions make them more courageous than older men are; the hot temper prevents fear and the hopeful disposition creates confidence. We cannot feel fear so long as we are feeling angry, and any expectation of good makes us confident.