them into peaceable and
law-abiding, even though not well-disposed citizens. In this process the
forces of law and order can be materially helped by skillful and
intelligent cooeperation. But it takes brains to do it and avoid doing
more harm than good. It requires far more intelligence on the part of
the doctor, the nurse, or the mother, skillfully to help nature than it
did blindly to fight her.

This is what doctors and nurses are trained for nowadays, and they are
of use in the sick-room simply because they have devoted more time and
money to the study of these complicated processes than you have. Don't
imagine that calling in the doctor is going to interfere with the
natural course of the disease, or rob the patient of some chance he
might have had of recovering by himself. On the contrary, it will simply
give nature and the constitution of the patient a better chance in the
struggle, probably shorten it, and certainly make it less painful and
distressing.

If these symptoms of the summer fevers and fluxes are indicative of
nature's attempts to cure, those of the winter's coughs and colds are no
less clearly so. As we walk down the streets, we see staring at us in
large letters from a billboard, "_Stop that Cough! It is Killing you!_"
Yet few things could be more obvious to even the feeblest intelligence,
than that this "killing" cough is simply an attempt on the part of the
body to expel and get rid of irritating materials in the upper
air-passages. As long as your larynx and windpipe are inflamed or
tickled by disease-germs or other poisons, your body will do its best to
get rid of them by coughing, or, if they swarm on the mucous membrane of
the nose, by sneezing. To attempt to stop either coughing or sneezing
without removing the cause is as irrational as putting out a
switch-light without closing the switch. Though this, like other
remedial processes, may go to extremes and interfere with sleep, or
upset the stomach, within reasonable limits one of the best things to do
when you have a cold is to cough. When patients with severe
inflammations of the lungs become too weak or too deeply narcotized to
cough, then attacks of suffocation from the accumulation of mucus in the
air-tubes are likely to occur at any time. Young children who cannot
cough properly, not having got the mechanism properly organized as yet,
have much greater difficulty in keeping their bronchial tubes clear in
bronchitis or pneumonia than