When Benjamin Franklin deferred to Thomas Jefferson in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, he did so for multiple reasons. He wished to avoid the annoyance of being edited by the committee of the whole Continental Congress, as Jefferson was, to Jefferson’s great distress. Franklin sought to ensure the support of Jefferson’s Virginia for a revolution begun in New England. He wanted to give the younger man a chance to shine.
Franklin’s reputation was already secure. Before the American Revolution made Jefferson and George Washington and the other founders famous, Franklin was hailed internationally as one of the great philosophers — that is, scientists — of the age. His work in electricity had won him the era’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and his many admirers spanned Britain and continental Europe.
Yet it was Franklin’s attention to another science that has a more modern ring. In Franklin’s day medicine rarely warranted the label of science, with theories of disease running from rank superstition to wild surmise. As I have written in my book, “The First American,” Franklin brought to the field an aptitude for keen observation and an ability to draw general conclusions from scattered evidence.
The Cold Doesn’t Cause a Cold, He Observed
His contemporaries typically ascribed the common cold to a chilling of the sufferer; hence the name for the malady. Franklin disagreed. A regular crosser of the Atlantic, he observed that sailors, frequently chilled in their work, rarely caught cold. It wasn’t being chilled that caused colds, he conjectured, but being closed indoors with other people already infected — as occurred during winter, the season of colds. Fresh air, far from causing colds, helped prevent them.
