‘Close the window or I’ll get a stiff neck and a cold’.
‘Don’t go to bed with wet hair or you’ll get a cold’.
‘Put on something warm so you don’t catch a cold’.
Since I am recovering from a common cold, these and other pieces of everyday wisdom have been circulating in my thick head. I have heard them from ostensibly intelligent people after swimming in the Black Sea when the water was a ‘chilly’ 25 degrees, from people who have imbibed them with their mother’s milk and regurgitate them unthinkingly, from my many wives and fruits of my loins at every conceivable opportunity. And I love trotting them out with an ironic twist whenever the chance arises.
But what’s interesting about this one is how useless dry, rational, scientific ‘facts’ are. No matter how often some specialist tells us that you don’t catch from a chill, from wet hair, from not wearing a scarf, people simply keep telling the same grand old story. No matter how regularly you come across explanations that viruses may enter your body from water droplets, from door handles, from touching someone who has the virus, it makes no difference – ‘don’t get a chill or you’ll catch a cold’ is as safe as ever.
At this quotidian level, it reflects the power of myths, legends, beliefs – and a bloody good thing it is too. So next time someone opens a window for fresh air in winter, tell them, ‘shut that pneumonia hole or I’ll get a stiff neck …’
26 February, 2012 at 12:04 pm
But I heard a doctor who said that there is a bit of truth in those. If you are feeling cold, your immunity goes down because your body has to struggle to keep your body temperature up, so if you picked up a virus it is more likely that it will multiply faster and that you will get a full blown cold.
26 February, 2012 at 5:55 pm
I’m afraid that’s a pile of shit, but a great example of sustaining the myth. Getting out and getting cold and wet strengthens immunity. Staying inside in a warm environment with closed windows is a much surer way of getting a cold. But that’s just boring, dry science. Doesn’t affect the myth one bit.
26 February, 2012 at 11:42 pm
I’m sorry, but “getting cold and wet strenghtens immunity” also sounds like a myth.
27 February, 2012 at 3:01 am
Ever heard of taking a cold shower every morning, especially in, say, a Russian winter, to build up toughness? Then there’s the mother who sends her kids out to play in mud puddles in winter for a similar reason.
26 February, 2012 at 7:48 pm
But it is this separation of “facts” (albeit scare-quoted [a bracketing gesture revealing idealism], or rather because scare-quoted) from “myth” which is myth-making at its purest. The idea that there is some discourse which is especially mythical, or especially disinterested in “facts” (whether scare-quoted facts or not), or which is as resistant as the common cold to scientific findings – is pure ideology, pure myth. So the question we must ask is: what power is thereby being protected? what interests are thereby being served? One then recalls the author’s interest in selling the idea of the continued worth of studying one particular myth, writing books about it, obtaining grants it, and the answer is either too obvious to mention or denied passionately.
27 February, 2012 at 3:00 am
The slipperiness of myth, which of course I used precisely due to its glissant properties.
27 February, 2012 at 3:06 am
And Deano, that prose is, um, a little convolutedly turgid.
27 February, 2012 at 8:49 am
Yes, it was. I apologise.
2 March, 2012 at 6:08 pm
[...] Don’t get a chill or you’ll catch a cold [...]
2 March, 2012 at 6:09 pm
[...] my earlier post about the mythical status of that common assumption that getting a chill will give you a cold, my mother decided to write to me as follows: Now I did tell you you’d catch a cold when you met [...]