Selfish bastard! Saw this over on Off-Guardian.
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Me too! 
The first thought that springs to this mischievous mind on seeing that story (one of Off-G btl-person SCooper’s, was it?) is that we should NEVER just ‘trust The Science’. Instead, always do what the basic scientific method exhorts: Never believe anything at all as proven true beyond any further possibility of question. Instead, be willing permanently to entertain absolutely ANY possibility as a hypothesis, no matter how outre at first glance; but at the same time, ALWAYS keep humming to yourself: ‘It ain’t necessarily so…’ Difficult mental trick for fundamentally irrational humankind.
And indeed what we now think (also permanently provisionally, of course), is that it wasn’t actually so: that that inhalation practice gave no particular protection against the terror-de-jour of that time - the ‘Spanish’ flu - but actually damaged throat and lungs.
Rinse and repeat in 2020: a terrifying, all-destroying invisible enemy, which can only be beaten if everyone in the world takes repeated poison-stabs! Yeah, right…
Is that mass inhalation machine any dafter than the current mask/hide/avoid/get-repeatedly-stabbed-with-killer-poisons lunacy? Not a whit!
Humans are not reasonable creatures. We’re always-emotion-driven, with a recently-evolved optional add-on device that enables us to be coolly rational - when it suits us emotionally, and only then. ‘Nimoy, thou shoulds’t be living at this hour…’ 
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But when the Orange bloke said to gargle with bleach they shrieked to high heaven. I vaguely remember being coerced to gargle TCP diluted in hot water, for some or other reason. This was apparently ok, but the same trick with Dettol, definitely not.
These days a Toilet Duck once a week has me pipes all smug and lovely. </onlineharm>
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Indeed, although it was, presumably, the science du jour. Its administration was, perhaps, significantly more benign than today’s ‘inhalation’ if we are generous and accept that its administration was done with good intent and little awareness of the harmful consequences; not to mention the severity of that flu. Can the same be said today?
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Ya gotta laff! Especially the Toilet Duck thing. Yep, that’ll fix it! Fix feckin’ anything, wunnit? 
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