This I Attribute To The
Excessive Heat Kept Up In The Rooms And Houses By The Stoves.
As smoking is
so prevalent here, this contributes much also to keeping the body in a
praeternatural heat and rendering it still more obnoxious to cold on
removal from a room to the open air.
It has been remarked by a medical
author, in the Russian campaign in 1812, that the soldiers of the southern
nations and provinces, viz., Provencaux, Gascons, Italians, Spaniards, and
Portuguese, endured the cold much better and suffered less from it than the
Germans and Hollanders. The reason is sufficiently obvious: the former live
in the open air even in the middle of winter and seldom make use of a fire
to warm themselves; whereas the Germans and Dutch live in an atmosphere of
stove-heat and smoke and seldom like to stir abroad in the open air during
winter, unless necessity obliges them. Hence they become half-baked, as it
were; their nerves are unstrung, their flesh flabby and they become so
chilly, as to suffer from the smallest exposure to the atmosphere. In the
houses in Germany, on account of the stoves, the cold is never felt,
whereas it is very severely in Italy and Spain where many of the houses
have no fireplaces. On this account I prefer Germany as a winter residence,
for I think there is no sensation so disagreeable as to feel cold in the
house. In the open air I do not care a fig for it, for my cloak lined with
bearskin protects me amply.
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