COLDS AND HOW TO CATCH THEM
Ancient vibrations are hard to stop, and still harder to control.
Whether they date from our driving back by the polar ice-sheet, together
with our titanic Big Game, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the
sabre-toothed tiger, from our hunting-grounds in Siberia and Norway, or
from recollections of hunting parties pushing north from our tropical
birth-lands, and getting trapped and stormbound by the advance of the
strange giant, Winter, certain it is that our subconsciousness is full
of ancestral memories which send a shiver through our very marrow at the
mere mention of "cold" or "sleet" or "wintry blasts."
From the earliest dawn of legend cold has always been ranked, with
hunger and pestilence and storm, as one of the demons to be dreaded and
fought. And, at a little later date, the ancient songs and sayings of
every people have been full of quaint warnings against the danger of a
chill, a draft, wet feet, or damp sheets. There is, of course, a
bitterly substantial basis for this feeling, as the dozens of stiffened
forms whose only winding-sheet was the curling snowdrift, or whose
coffin the frozen sleet, bear ghastly witness. It was, however, long ago
discovered that when we were properly fed and clothed, the Cold Demon
could be absolutely defied, even in a tiny hut made out of pressed snow
and warmed by a smoky seal-blubber lamp; that the Storm King could be
baffled just by burrowing into his own snowdrifts and curling up under
the crust, like an Eskimo dog. Hence, nearly all the legends depict the
hero as finally conquering the Storm King, like Shingebis in the Song of
Hiawatha.
The ancient terror, however, still clings, with a hold the more
tenacious as it becomes narrowed, to one large group of these calamities
believed to be produced by cold,--namely, those diseases supposed to be
caused by exposure to the weather. Even here, it still has a
considerable basis in fact; but the general trend of opinion among
thoughtful physicians is that this basis is much narrower than was at
one time supposed, and is becoming still more restricted with the
progress of scientific knowledge. For instance, fifty years ago, popular
opinion, and even the majority of medical belief, was that consumption
and all of its attendant miseries were chiefly due to exposure to cold.
Now we know that, on the contrary, abundance of pure, fresh, cold air is
the best cure for the disease, and foul air and overcrowding its chief
cause. An almost equally complete about-face has been executed in regard
to pneumonia. Prolonged and excessive exposure to cold may be the match
that fires the mine, but we are absolutely certain that two other things
are necessary, namely, the presence of the diplococcus, and a lowered
and somewhat vitiated state of bodily resistance, due to age, overwork,
underfeeding, or over-indulgence in alcohol.
Not only do these two diseases not occur in the land of perpetual cold,
the frozen North, except where they are introduced by civilized
visitors,--and scarce a single death from pneumonia has ever yet
occurred in the crew of an Arctic expedition,--but it has actually been
proposed to fit up a ship for a summer trip through the Arctic regions,
as a floating sanatorium for consumptives, on account of the purity of
the air and the brilliancy of the sunlight.
There is one realm, however, where the swing of this ancient
superstition vibrates with fullest intensity, and that is in those
diseases which, as their name implies, are still believed to be due to
exposure to a lowered temperature--"common colds." Here again it has a
certain amount of rational basis, but this is growing less and less
every day. The present attitude of thoughtful physicians may be
graphically indicated by the flippant inquiry of the riddle-maker, "When
is a cold not a cold?" and the answer, "Two-thirds of the time." This
much we are certain of already: that the majority of so-called "colds"
have little or nothing to do with exposure to a low temperature, that
they are entirely misnamed, and that a better term for them would be
_fouls_. In fact, this proportion can be clearly and definitely proved
and traced as infections spreading from one victim to another. The best
place to catch them is not out-of-doors, or even in drafty hallways, but
in close, stuffy, infected hotel bedrooms, sleeping-cars, churches, and
theatres.
Two arguments in rebuttal will at once be brought forward, both
apparently conclusive. One is that colds are vastly more frequent in
winter, and the other that when you sit in a draft until you feel
chilly, you inevitably have a cold afterward. Both these arguments
alike, however, are based upon a misunderstanding. The frequency of
colds in winter is chiefly due to the fact that, at this time of the
year, we crowd into houses and rooms, shutting the doors and windows in
order to keep warm, and thus provide a ready-made hothouse for the
cultivation and transmission from one to another of the influenza and
other bacilli. As the brilliant young English pulmonary expert, Dr.
Leonard Williams, puts it, "a constant succession of colds implies a
mode of life in which all aërial microbes are afforded abundant
opportunities." At the same time, we take less exercise and sit far less
in the open air, thus lowering our general vigor and resisting power and
making us more susceptible to attack. Those who live out-of-doors winter
and summer, and who ventilate their houses properly, even in cold
weather, suffer comparatively little more from colds in the winter-time
than they do in summer; although, of course, the most vigorous
individual, in the best ventilated surroundings, will occasionally
succumb to some particularly virulent infection.
The second fact of experience, catching cold after sitting in a draft or
a chilly room until you begin to cough or sneeze, is one to which a
majority of us would be willing to testify personally, and yet it is
based upon something little better than an illusion. It is a well-known
peculiarity of many fevers and infections to begin with a chill. The
patient complains of shiverings up and down his spine, his fingernails
and his lips become blue, in extreme cases his teeth chatter, and his
limbs begin to twitch and shake, and he ends up in a typical ague fit.
The best known, because most striking, illustration is malaria, or fever
and ague, "chills and fever," as it is variously termed. But this form
of attack, milder and much slighter in degree, may occur in almost every
known infection, such as pneumonia, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet
fever, measles, and influenza. It has nothing whatever to do with either
external or internal temperature; for if you slip a fever-thermometer
under your chilling patient's tongue, it will usually register anywhere
from 102 to 105°.
This method of attack is especially common, not only in influenza, but
also in all the other so-called "common colds." In fact, when we begin
to shiver and sneeze and hunt around for an imaginary draft or lowering
of the temperature which has caused it, we are actually in the first
stage of the development of an infection which was contracted hours, or
even days, before.
When you begin to shiver and sneeze and run at the eyes you are not
"catching" cold; you have already caught it long before, and it is
beginning to break out on you. Mere exposure to cold will never cause
sneezing. It takes a definite irritation of the nasal mucous membrane,
by gas or dust from without, or toxins from within, to produce a sneeze.
As to mere exposure to cold weather and wet and storm being able to
produce it, it is the almost unanimous testimony of Arctic explorers
that, during their sojourn of from two to three years in the frozen
North, they never had so much as a sneeze or a sore throat, even though
frequently sheltered in extemporized huts, and running short of adequate
food-supply before spring. Within a week of their return to civilization
they would begin sneezing and coughing, and catch furious colds.
Lumbermen, trappers, hunters, and prospectors in Alaska give similar
testimony. I have talked with scores of these pioneers, visiting them,
in fact, in their camps under conditions of wet, cold, and exposure that
would have made one afraid of either pneumonia or rheumatism before
morning, and found that, so long as they remained up in the mountains or
out in the snow, and no case of influenza, sore throat, or cold happened
to be brought into the camp, they would be entirely free from coughs and
colds; but that, upon returning to civilization and sleeping in the
stuffy room of a rude frontier hotel, they would frequently catch cold
within three days.
One unusually intelligent foreman of a lumber camp in Oregon told me
that an experience of this kind had occurred to him three different
times that he could distinctly recollect.
It is difficult to catch a cold or pneumonia unless the bacilli are
there to be caught. Boswell has embalmed for us, in the amber of his
matchless biography, the fact that it had been noted, even in those
days, that the inhabitants of one of the Faroe Islands never had colds
in the head except on the rare occasions when a ship would touch
there--usually not oftener than once a year. Then, within a week, half
the population would be blowing and sneezing. The great Samuel commented
upon the fact at length, and advanced the ingenious explanation that, as
the harbor was so difficult of entry, the ships could beat in only when
the wind was in a certain quarter, and that quarter was the nor'east.
_Hinc illæ lacrimæ!_ (Hence these weeps!) The colds were caused by the
northeast wind of unsavory reputation! How often the wind got into the
northeast without bringing a ship or colds he apparently did not
speculate.
To come nearer yet, did you ever catch cold when camping out? I have
waked in the morning with the snow drifting across the back of my neck,
been wet to the skin all day, and gone to bed in my wet clothes, and
slept myself dry; and have lain out all day in a November gale, in a
hollow scooped in the half-frozen ground of the duck-marsh, and felt
never a hair the worse. Scores of similar experiences will rise up in
the minds of every camper, hunter, or fisherman. You _may_ catch cold
during the first day or two out, before you have got the foul city air,
with its dust and bacteria, out of your lungs and throat, but even this
rarely happens.
How seldom one catches cold from swimming, no matter how cold the water;
or from boating, or fishing,--even without the standard prophylactic; or
from picnicking, or anything that is done during a day in the open air.
So much for the negative side of the evidence, that colds are not often
caught where infectious materials are absent. Now for the positive side.
First of all, that typical cold of colds, influenza, or the grip, is now
unanimously admitted by authorities to be a pure infection, due to a
definite germ (the _bacillus influenzæ_ of Pfeiffer) and one of the most
contagious diseases known. Each of the great epidemics of it--1830-33,
1836-37, 1847-48, and, of most vivid and unblessed memory, 1889-90--can
be traced in its stately march completely across the civilized world,
beginning, as do nearly all our world-epidemics,--cholera, plague,
influenza, etc.,--in China, and spreading, _via_ India or Turkestan, to
Russia, Berlin, London, New York, Chicago. Moreover, its rate of
progress is precisely that of the means of travel: camel-train,
post-chaise, railway, as the case may be. The earlier epidemics took two
years to spread from Eastern Russia to New York; the later ones, forty
to sixty days. Soon it will beat Jules Verne or George Francis Train. So
intensely "catching" is it, that letters written by sufferers have been
known to infect the correspondents who received them in a distant town,
and become the starting-point of a local epidemic.
Of course, it may be urged that when we have proved the grip to be a
definite infection, we have taken it out of the class of "colds"
altogether, and that its bacterial origin proves nothing in regard to
the rest. But a rather interesting state of affairs developed during the
search for the true bacillus of influenza: this was that a dozen other
bacilli and cocci were discovered, each of which seemed capable of
causing all the symptoms of the _grip_, though in milder form. So that
the view of the majority of pathologists now is that these
"influenzoid," or "grip-like" attacks, under which come a majority of
all _common colds_, are probably due to a number of different milder
micro-organisms.
The next fact in favor of the infectious character of a cold is that it
begins with a chill, followed with a fever, runs a definite self-limited
course, and, barring complications, gets well of itself in a certain
time, just like the measles, scarlet fever, pneumonia, or any other
frank infection.
Colds are also followed by inflammations, or toxic attacks in other
organs of the body, lungs, stomach, bowels, heart, kidneys, nerves,
etc., just like diphtheria, scarlet fever, or typhoid, only, of course,
of milder form and less frequently.
Last, but not least practically convincing, colds may be traced from one
victim to another, may "run through" households, schools, factories, may
occur after attending church or theatre, may be checked by isolating the
sufferers; and are now most effectually treated by the inhalation of
non-poisonous germicidal or antiseptic vapors and sprays.
One of my first experiences with this last method occurred in a most
unexpected field. An old friend, a most interesting and intelligent
German, was the proprietor of a wild-animal depot, importing foreign
animals and birds and selling them to the zoölogical gardens and
circuses. I used often to drop in there to see if he had anything new,
and he would come up to see me, to tell me his troubles and keep my
dissecting-table supplied with interestingly diseased dead beasts and
birds.
One day he came up in a state of great excitement, with a very dead and
dilapidated parrot in his hand.
"Choost look, Dogdor; here's one of dose measley new pollies I god in
from Zingapore. De rest iss coffin' an' sneezin' to plow dere peaks off,
an' all de utter caitches iss kitchen him."
As parrots are worth from fifteen to thirty dollars apiece, "green" (not
in color, but training), and he had fifty or sixty in the store, the
situation was distinctly serious. Now, I was no specialist in the
peculiar diseases of parrots, but something had to be done, and, with a
boldness born of long practice, I drew my bow at a venture and let fly
this suggestion:--
"Try formalin; it's pretty fierce on the eyes and nose, but it won't
kill 'em; and, if you put a teaspoonful in the bottom of each cage, by
the time it evaporates no germ that gets into that cage will live long
enough to do any harm."
Five days later back he came, red-eyed but triumphant. "Dogdor, dot
vormaleen iss de pest shtuff I effer saw. It mos' shteenk me out of de
shtore, an' de pollies nearly sneeze dere fedders off, but it shtopt de
spret, an' _it's cureenall de seek ones_, an' I het a cold in de het,
_an' it's curt me_."
Before using it he had fourteen cases and three deaths; after, only
three new cases and no more deaths. I would, however, hardly advise any
human "coldie" to try such heroic treatment offhand, for the pungency
and painfulness of formalin vapor is something ferocious, though the
French physicians, with characteristic courage, are making extensive use
of it for this purpose, with excellent results under careful
supervision.
Another curious straw pointing in the direction of the infectious nature
of colds is the "annual cold," or "yearly sore throat," from which many
of us suffer. When we have had it we usually feel fairly safe from colds
for some months at least, often for a year. The only explanation that
seems in the least to explain is that colds, like other infections,
confer an immunity against another attack; only, unlike scarlet fever,
measles, smallpox, etc., this immunity, instead of for life, is only for
six months or a year. This immunity is due to the formation in the blood
of protective substances known as _anti-bodies_, which destroy or render
harmless the invading germs. Flabby, under-ventilated individuals, who
are always "catching cold," have such weak resisting powers that they
form hardly enough anti-bodies to terminate the first attack, without
having enough left to protect them from another for more than a few
weeks or months. Dr. Leonard Williams describes chronic cold-catchers as
"people who wear flannel next their skins, ... who know they are in a
draft because it makes them sneeze; who, in short, live thoroughly
unwholesome, coddling lives." Strong and vigorous individuals may form
enough to last them a year, or even two years.
Now comes the question, "What are we going to do about it?" Obviously,
we cannot "go gunning" for these countless billions of germs, of
fifteen or twenty different species. Nor can we quarantine every one who
has a cold. Fortunately, no such radical methods are necessary. All we
have to do is to take nature's hint of the anti-bodies and improve upon
it. Healthy cells can grow fat on a diet of such germs, and, if we keep
ourselves vigorous, clean, and well ventilated, we can practically defy
the "cold" devil and all his works.
Here is the _leitmotif_ of the whole fascinating drama of infection and
immunity. We can study only one phrasing here. We shall, of course,
catch cold occasionally, but will throw it off quickly, and probably
form anti-bodies enough to last us a year or more. How can this be done?
First and foremost, by living and sleeping as much as possible in the
open air. This helps in several different ways. First, by increasing the
vigor and resisting power of our bodies; second, by helping to burn up,
clean, and rid our tissues of waste products which are poisons if
retained; third, by greatly reducing the risks of infection.
You can't catch cold by sitting in a field exposed to the draft from an
open gate; though I understand that casuists of the old school of the
"chill-and-damp" theory of colds are still discussing the case of the
patient who "caught his death o' cold" by having his gruel served in a
damp basin.
The first thing to do is to get the outdoor habit. This takes time to
acquire, but, once formed, you wouldn't exchange it for anything else on
earth. The next thing is to learn to sit or sleep in a gentle current of
air all the time you are indoors. You ought to feel uncomfortable
unless you can feel air blowing across your face night and day. Then you
are reasonably sure it is fresh, and it is the only way to be sure of
it.
But drafts are so dangerous! As the old rhyme runs,
But when a draft blows through a hole,
Make your will and mend your soul.
Pure superstition! It just shows what's in a name. Call it a gentle
breeze, or a current of fresh air, and no one is afraid of it. Call it a
"draft," and up go hands and eyebrows in horror at once. One of our
highest authorities on diseases of the lungs, Dr. Norman Bridge, has
well dubbed it "The Draft Fetich." It is a fetich, and as murderous as
Moloch. The draft is a friend instead of an enemy. What converted most
of us to a belief in the beneficence of drafts was the open-air
treatment of consumption! Hardly could there have been a more
spectacular proof, a more dramatic defiance of the bogey. To make a
poor, wasted, shivering consumptive, in a hectic one hour and a
drenching sweat the next, lie out exposed to the November weather all
day and sleep in a ten-knot gale at night! It looked little short of
murder! So much so to some of us, that we decided to test it on
ourselves before risking our patients.
I can still vividly recall the astonishment with which I woke one frosty
December morning, after sleeping all night in a breeze across my head
that literally made
Each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,
not only without the sign of a sniffle, but feeling as if I'd been made
new while I slept.
Then we tried it in fear and trembling on our patients, and the delight
of seeing the magic it worked! That is an old story now, but it has
never lost its charm. To see the cough which has defied "dopes" and
syrups and cough mixtures, domestic, patent, and professional, for
months, subside and disappear in from three to ten days; the night
sweats dry up within a week; the appetite come back; the fever fall; the
strength and color return, as from the magic kiss of the free air of the
woods, the prairies, the seacoast. There's nothing else quite like it on
the green earth. Do you wonder that we become "fresh-air fiends"?
The only thing we dread in these camps is the imported "cold." Dr.
Lawrence Flick was the first to show us the way in this respect as in
several others. He put up a big sign at the entrance of White Haven
Sanatorium, "No persons suffering from colds allowed to enter," and
traced the only epidemic of colds in the sanatorium to the visit of a
butcher with the grip. I put up a similar sign at the gate of my Oregon
camp, and never had a patient catch cold from tenting out in the snow
and "Oregon mists" until the small son of the cook came back from the
village school, shivering and sneezing, when seven of the thirteen
patients "caught it" within a week.
What will cure a consumptive will surely not kill a healthy man. I am
delighted to say that it shows signs of becoming a fad now, and sleeping
porches are being put on houses all over the country. No house in
California is considered complete without them. The ideal bedroom is a
small dressing-room, opening on a wide screened porch, or balcony, with
a door wide enough to allow the bed to be rolled inside during storms or
in severest weather.
Sleep on a porch, or in a room with windows on two sides wide open, and
the average living-room or office begins to feel stuffy and "smothery"
at once. Apply the same treatment here. Learn to sit in a gentle draft,
and you'll avoid two-thirds of your colds and three-fourths of your
headaches. It may be necessary in winter to warm the draft, but don't
let any patent method of ventilation delude you into keeping your
windows shut any hour of the day or night.
On the other hand, don't fall into the widespread delusion that because
air is cold it is necessarily pure. Some of the vilest air imaginable is
that shut up in those sepulchres known as "best bedrooms," which chill
your very marrow. The rheumatism or snuffles you get from sleeping
between their icy sheets comes from the crop of bacilli which has lurked
there since they were last aired. The "no heat in a bedroom" dogma is
little better than superstition, born of those fecund parents which mate
so often, stinginess and puritanism. Practically, the room which will
_never_ have a window opened in it in winter is the one without any
heat.
Similarly, the air in an underheated church, hall, or theatre is almost
sure to be foul. The janitor will keep every opening closed in order to
get the temperature up. Some churches are never once decently ventilated
from December to May. The same old air, with an ever richer crop of
germs, is reheated and served up again every Sunday. The "odor of
sanctity" is the residue of the breaths and perspiration of successive
generations. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is sometimes
an astonishingly long step behind it.
The next important step is to keep clean, both externally and
internally: externally, by cold bathing, internally, by exercise. The
only reason why a draft ever hurts us is because we are full of
self-poisons, or germs. The self-poisons can be best got rid of by
abundant exercise in the open air and plenty of pure, cold H2O,
internally and externally.
Food has very little to do with these autotoxins, and they are as likely
to form on one diet as another. In fact, they form normally and in
states of perfect health, and are poisonous only if retained too long.
It is simply a question of burning them up, and getting rid of them
quickly enough, by exercise, with its attendant deep breathing and
perspiration. The lungs are great garbage-burners. Exercise every day
till you puff and sweat.
A blast of cold air suddenly stops the escape of these poisons through
the skin and throws them on the lungs, liver, or kidneys. The resulting
disturbance is the second commonest form of a "cold," and covers perhaps
a third of all cases occurring. This is the cold that can be prevented
by the cold bath. Keep the skin hardened and toned up to such a pitch
that no reasonable chill will stop it from excreting, and you are safe.
Never depend on clothing. The more you pile on, the more you choke and
"flabbify" the skin and make it ready to "strike" on the first breath of
cold air. Too heavy flannels are cold-breeders, and chest-protectors
inventions of the evil one. Trust the skin; it is one of the most
important and toughest organs in the body, if only given half a chance.
But the most frequent way in which drafts precipitate a cold is by
temporarily lowering the vital resistance. This gives the swarms of
germs present almost constantly in our noses, throats, stomachs, bowels,
etc., the chance they have been looking for--to break through the cell
barrier and run riot in the body.
So long as the pavement-cells of our mucous membranes are healthy, they
can keep them out indefinitely. Lower their tone by cold, fatigue,
underfeeding, and their line is pierced in a dozen places at once. One
of the many horrifying things which bacteriology has revealed is that
our bodies are simply alive with germs, even in perfect health. One
enthusiastic dentist has discovered and described no less than
_thirty-three_ distinct species, each one numbering its billions, which
inhabit our gums and teeth. Our noses, our stomachs, our
intestines,--each boasts a similar population. Most of them do no harm
at all; indeed, some probably assist in the processes of digestion;
others are camp-followers, living on our leavings; others, captive
enemies which have been clubbed into peaceful behavior by our leucocyte
and anti-body police.
For instance, not a few healthy noses and throats contain the bacillus
of diphtheria and the diplococcus of pneumonia. We are beginning to find
that these last two groups will bear watching. Like camp-followers
elsewhere, they carry knives, and are not above using them on the
wounded after dark. In fact, they have a cheerful habit of taking a
hand in any disturbance that starts in their bailiwick, and usually on
the side against the body-cells.
Finally, while clearly realizing that the best defense is attack, and
that our chief reliance should be upon keeping ourselves in such
fighting trim that we can "eat 'em alive" at any time, there is no sense
in running easily avoidable risks, and we should keep away from
infection as far as possible. If a child comes to school heavy-eyed,
hoarse, and snuffling, the teacher should send him home at once. He will
only waste his time attempting to study in that trim, and may infect a
score of others. Moreover, it may be remarked, parenthetically, that
these are also symptoms of the beginning of measles, scarlet fever, and
diphtheria, and two-thirds of all cases of these would be sent home
before they could infect any one else if this procedure were the rule.
If your own child develops a cold, if mild, keep him playing
out-of-doors by himself; or if severe, keep him in bed, in a
well-ventilated room, for three or four days. He'll get better twice as
quick as if at school, and the rest of the household will escape.
When you wake with a stuffed head and aching bones, stay at home for a
few days if possible, out of regard for your customers, your
fellow-clerks, or your office force, as well as yourself. If one of your
employees comes to work shivering, give him three days' vacation on full
pay. If it runs through the force, you'll lose five times as much in
enforced sick-leaves, slowness, and mistakes. Above all, don't go to any
public gatherings,--to church, the theatre, or parties,--when you are
snuffling and coughing. You are not exactly a joy to your beholders,
even if you don't infect them. It is advisable, and well worth the
trifling trouble and expense, to fumigate thoroughly with formalin all
churches, theatres, and schoolrooms at least once a month. Reasonable
and public-spirited precautions of this sort are advisable, not only to
avoid colds themselves, which are disagreeable and dangerous enough, but
because mild infections of this sort are far the commonest single means
of making a breach in our body-ramparts through which more serious
diseases like consumption, pneumonia, and rheumatism may force an entry.
Colds do not "run into" consumption or pneumonia, but they bear much the
same relation to them that good intentions are said to do to the
infernal regions. They release the lid of a perfect Pandora's box of
distempers--tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatism, bronchitis, Bright's
disease, neuritis, endocarditis. A cold is no longer a joke. A
generation ago a prominent physician was asked by an anxious mother,
"Doctor, how would you treat a cold?"
"With contempt, madam," replied the great man.
That day is past, and has lasted too long. Intelligently regarded and
handled, they are the least harmful of diseases; neglected, one of the
most dangerous, because there are such legions of them. To sum up, if
you wish to revel in colds, all that is necessary is to observe the
following few and simple rules:--
Keep your windows shut.
Avoid drafts as if they were a pestilence.
Take no exercise between meals.
Bathe seldom, and in warm water.
Wear heavy flannels, chest-protectors, abdominal bandages, and electric
insoles.
Have no heat in your bedroom.
Never let anything keep you away from church, the theatre, or parties,
in winter.
Never go out-of-doors when it's windy, or rainy, or wet underfoot, or
cold, or hot, or looks as if it was going to be any of these.
Be just as intimate and affectionate as possible with every one you know
who has a cold. Don't neglect them on any account.