These various causes having either separately or conjointly predisposed the body to Phthisis, are most frequently excited into action by a common catarrh; which becomes the more active by frequent repetition. The danger arising from catarrh is not a little increased by the popular mode of treating it: stimulating spirituous drinks, and a vast variety of remedies of the same class are the usual prescriptions. Almost every body has an infallible remedy for a cold; some of them innocent, but many injurious. The common prejudice in favour of “feeding a cold” increases the mischief, and unfortunately, the disease not generally affecting the system sufficiently to destroy the appetite, as in many other maladies, nature does not prevent the practice. Abstinence, cooling acidulous drinks, with perhaps a gentle saline cathartic, are the safest and most effectual remedies in curing a common catarrh, when of its usual slight form. At the same time, inhaling warm air, by means of Mudge’s apparatus, is a valuable and grateful auxiliary to this treatment. Catarrh is so common and generally so easily cured without any consequent ill effects, that it is too apt to be neglected. Many a patient, labouring under incipient Phthisis, has been supposed to be affected by merely a “trifling cold,” and the only opportunity for curing the disease has been lost. “The evil becomes irremediable before it calls either the attention of the parents, the friends, or even the physician, who has not been familiarly conversant with the fatal consequences of this disease.”[5]