The principal reason why colds are so {206} frequent in the winter time in our cities and that pneumonia has increased so much is mainly because people are afraid of standing a little cold. Office buildings are now heated up to seventy degrees to make the personnel absolutely comfortable even on the coldest days, and as a consequence the air is so dry that it is more arid--that is more lacking in water vapor, as the United States Public Health Service pointed out--than Death Valley, Arizona, in summer. People dress too warmly, anticipating wintry days and often getting milder weather and thus making themselves susceptible to chilling because the skin is so warm that the blood is attracted to the surface. Will power to stand cold, even though at a little cost of discomfort, is the best preventive of coughs and colds and their complications and the best remedy for them, once the acute febrile stage has passed. {207} CHAPTER XIV NEUROTIC ASTHMA AND THE WILL "Great minds of partial indulgence To their benumbed wills." _Troilus and Cressida_. In closing a clinical lecture on bronchial asthma at the University of Marburg some years ago, Professor Friedrich Müller, who afterwards became professor at Berlin, said, "Each asthmatic patient is a problem by himself and must be studied as such; meantime, it must not be forgotten what an important rôle suggestion plays in the treatment of the disease." This represents very probably the reason why so many remedies have been recommended for asthma and have proved very successful in the hands of their inventors or discoverers as regards the first certain number of patients who use them, and yet on subsequent investigation have turned out to be of no special therapeutic value and sometimes indeed to have no physical effect of any significance. {208} Of course this is said with regard to neurotic asthma only, and must not be applied too particularly to other forms of the affection, though there is no doubt at all that the symptoms of even the most severe cases of organic asthma can be very much modified and often very favorably, by suggestive methods.