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The Curious Case of the Common Cold¹

From the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Medicine, School of Medicine, Western Reserve University, and the University Hospitals, Cleveland, Ohio

Abstract

The common cold is the most frequent ailment of mankind. Almost all of us have had it at least once, and most of us suffer from it several times each year, so that we know it personally. While a cold is frequently looked upon as a minor or even trivial disease, a host of observers and investigators have been concerned with it at one time or another. By 1932, for example, there were approximately 2000 papers in the literature dealing with this subject and literally hundreds of papers have been added since that time. It is curious, then, that we know so much about this disease and yet find it so elusive. It is curious that the common cold is so difficult to define sharply and clearly; that its epidemiology is so poorly understood and that its causes—definitive, predisposing, and precipitating—are so uncertain.

Footnotes

¹ Presidential address delivered before the American Association of Immunologists, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 15, 1958.