Only the Shadow Nose

I have a cold. I recognized my affliction immediately upon waking last Saturday morning to the sensation of someone shaving the inside of my throat with a rusty razor. My teeth wear slowly pulling themselves from my jaw. My head had swollen to roughly the size of a hot air balloon. My temples beat like tympani. My eyes were packing their bags, aware that at any moment they might be launched from their sockets by the pressure building in my sinuses. And on this morning we were packing for a two-day drive back from our Thanksgiving visit in DC with our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, from whom I apparently acquired the cold (making it a bit more tolerable). That evening, in a Walgreens near our hotel in Dayton, I cleaned the shelves of cold medication. That night I slept like a baby – a baby sneezing and coughing and oozing slime from several orifices.

You would think that by now medical research would have come up with a cure for the common cold. They can transplant virtually all of the vital organs of the body. They can slap mechanical hearts into terminally ill patients and allow them to survive for at least another few months of accruing astronomical hospital bills. They can provide prostheses for parts of the body that I didn’t even know existed.

So why can’t they cure the common cold? Why is it still “aspirin, fluids, and rest”? I think there are two possible answers.

First, medical research remains a plumb field financially. Each year the government, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies dump tons of money into research programs to pay for all those Petri dishes, Bunsen burners, and spiffy white coats that researchers and doctors like to wear in the hope that they will come up with a cure for the common cold. They know this, of course, and not being dumb, realize that if they were to come up with a cure for the common cold, the money would quickly dry up and they would have to go out and start buying their own clothes. So they continue developing prostheses and joint replacements, safe in the knowledge that the money will keep pouring in as long as the general public is still plagued by the common cold.

The second, less cynical possibility is that the medical researchers are serving a higher philosophical function. We are a people blindly dependent upon science and technology. Some time ago, we abandoned the view that science and technology were adjuncts, or mediators, to living, and adopted the view that they were the means for living itself. From cars and telephones and TV and computers to education and military and finance and medicine, we regard science and its multitude of accouterments as the very basis for life. Without them where would we be? Perhaps in their failure to provide us with a cure for the common cold, the researchers are leaving us with the most common of reminders of our human vulnerability, of our ultimate susceptibility to the reality of life.

Perhaps. Still, it’s little comfort when one wakes in a hotel room far from home to a sensation of having one’s throat shaved with a rusty razor. I’d just as soon have a cure.