“I have often asked him whether a person heated with exercise going suddenly into cold air, or standing still in a current of it, might not have his pores suddenly contracted, his perspiration stopped, and that matter thrown into the circulation, or cast upon the lungs, which he acknowledged was the cause of colds. To this he never could give me a satisfactory answer, and I have heard that in the opinion of his own able physician, Dr. Jones, he fell a sacrifice at last, not to the stone, but to his own theory, having caught the violent cold which finally choked him, by sitting for some hours at a window, with the cool air blowing upon him.” (Adams’s Works, vol. iii. p. 75.) In some of his letters Franklin denied positively that colds could be taken by exposure. He got a young physician to experiment on the effect of nakedness in increasing perspiration, and when he found, or thought he had found, that the perspiration was greater than when the body was clothed, he jumped to the conclusion that exposure could not check perspiration. In a passage in his notes, however, he seems to admit that a sudden cold air or a draught might check it. [Illustration: THE SUMNER PORTRAIT OF FRANKLIN] He wrote so well and so prettily on colds that people began to think he was the discoverer of their causes, and his biographer, Parton, goes so far as to say so. But upon inquiry among learned physicians I cannot find that they recognize him as a discoverer, or that he has any standing on this question in medical history. It would seem that he merely collected and expressed the observations of others as well as his own; none of them were entirely new, and many of them are now considered unsound. Nearer to the truth is Parton’s statement that “he was the first effective preacher of the blessed gospel of ventilation.” He certainly studied that subject very carefully, and was an authority on it, being appointed while in England to prepare a plan for ventilating the Houses of Parliament. It would, however, be better to say that he was one of the most prominent advocates of ventilation rather than the first effective preacher of it; for in Bigelow’s edition of his works[1] will be found an excellent essay on the subject in which the other advocates are mentioned. But Parton goes on to say, “He spoke, and the windows of hospitals were lowered; consumption ceased to gasp and fever to inhale poison;” which is an extravagant statement that he would find difficulty, I think, in supporting.