Hay fever and paroxysmal sneezing : their etiology and treatment with an appendix on rose cold / by Morell Mackenzie.

  • Mackenzie, Morell, 1837-1892.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hay fever and paroxysmal sneezing : their etiology and treatment with an appendix on rose cold / by Morell Mackenzie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    of the matter, i.e., the nature and conditions of the necessary “ predisposition ” have not yet been reached. We explain it by the help of “ that blessed word ” idiosyncrasy, which reminds us of the virtus dorinitiua whereby opium facit dormire, but when we have called it an “ idiosyncrasy,” how much nearer are we to a solution of the riddle ? Neverthe- less, the discovery of the proximate cause of the evil has this immense practical advantage that the exact source of danger being known, it can be avoided. Like sea-sickness, hay fever too often excites ridicule rather than sympathy—a proof that Hobbes’s definition of laughter, ill-natured as it sounds, has in it some element of truth. Yet the distress, trivial though it may appear to those who are free from it, is very real, and it is not strange that during the hay-season melancholy seems to have marked the sufferer for her own. What, indeed, is more likely to make a man curse his fate than the thought that when every one else is rejoicing in the beauty and brightness of the summer, he should have to shun the light and close his nostrils to the perfume of the flowers ; that a rose should be to him as sure and subtle, if not quite so deadly, a poison, as if it came from the garden of a Borgia ? Sufferers from hay fever may, however, gather some crumbs of comfort from the fact that the disease is almost exclusively confined to persons of cultivation. As, therefore, summer sneezing goes hand-in-hand with culture, we may, perhaps, infer that the higher we rise in the intellectual scale, the more is the tendency developed. Hence, as already hinted, our national proclivity to hay fever may be taken as a proof of our superiority to other races. The male sex is more liable than the female in the ratio of about three to one,—a fact which, coupled with what has just been said, may be commended to the earnest attention of the advocates of the equality of the sexes. When this idea of the intimate connexion between hay fever ^nd culture has been firmly grasped by the public