The Winter Cough

Overview

Everyone has the winter cough, most years, and nobody makes much of it. The peoples give one name to a whole crowd of small sicknesses: the running nose, the scratchy throat, the catarrh, and the bark that keeps a house awake. It passes in a week or two. Healers take it seriously only in the very old and the very young, because in them it is the first step towards lung fever.

Cause

Many different small sicknesses of the nose, throat, and chest are counted as one. They pass on the breath and on hands, and winter favours them because people crowd together round one fire with the shutters closed. A body that is cold, wet, tired, or hungry takes them more easily.

Who It Strikes

All the breathing peoples take it. Children take it most often, several times a winter, and grown adults less, having had so many. Kobolds, who feel the cold badly, complain of it most. The Wrought do not breathe and never take it.

Signs and Course

It starts with a scratch in the throat and sneezing, then a running nose, a stuffed head, and a mild fever or none. After a few days the nose dries and the cough begins, first dry, then loose. Most cases clear in a week, though the cough can hang on for two or three.

The turn to watch for comes after the third or fourth day: a fever that rises again instead of falling, a pain in the side, quick shallow breathing. That is lung fever beginning, and the patient is put to bed at once.

Contagion

It passes very easily, by breath, sneezes, and coughs, and on hands, cups, and shared bedding. One child brings it home and the whole house has it within the week.

Treatment and Its Limits

Household care is all it needs: rest, warmth, honey in hot water, broth, steam from a basin, and the herb teas every grandmother keeps for fever and chest (see Herbs). These ease it but do not shorten it much. No healer spends lifeforce on a plain cold. For the old and the newborn, the care that matters is keeping them warm, fed, and watched, so that lung fever is caught early.

Mortality

By itself it almost never kills. It kills through what follows it: some infants and many old people each winter die of the lung fever it opened the way to.

Lore and Belief

Every people blames the cold: wet feet, a draught on the neck, going out with wet hair, sleeping by an open window. Ogre camps ask Ghessa the Hearth-Mother, who cures chills, to keep it from the children. A sneeze is answered with a blessing in most tongues, and a red wool cloth at the throat or a bundle of dried herbs over the bed is said to keep it off.

In the Medieval Era

The winter cough is in every house, every winter, from the high holds to the river towns. It is nursed at home, it costs a few days' work, and it is the one sickness most people never think to fear.

Where It Appears

This ailment grows out of:

• Herbs (brews for fever)
• Medieval Ordinary Access Reference (minor fever relief)