How to understand "-a breath of theirs having mad"?

Maybe by a breath


Yes the construction seems awkward doesn’t it

Sounds unlikely.
Let's wait.

It's an allusion to the Judeo-Christian God's act of breathing life into Adam.

As God breathed life into Adam so the people breathed this Constitution into life.

Note too, he goes on to say that if the people can create a Constitution with their life-breath, they can also UNMAKE, CHANGE or MODIFY it. He's saying the Constitution belongs, not to the President or the Congress or The Supreme Court, but to the People who created it.

~You're reading the speech which probably cost President Harrison his life. He stood out in the freezing rain and historians have guessed that's where he contracted the pneumonia which killed him about a month later.

Joe(terrible speech as well)Nation

Well that's right.

You don't get pneumonia from standing out in a freezing rain or a normal rain. Or from sleeping out in -20 or -40.

Yes, my mother and the historians are all incorrect about catching a cold (or pneumonia) because you didn't dress warm enough in freezing weather, but, funny thing, JTT, if you take a 68 year old man, who's not in the best of shape, and you stick him out a nice wind-blown flag-dressed platform for three and half hours in the pouring cold rain while he delivers the longest inauguration speech before or since, would you agree that you might raise his susceptibility towards contracting either form of pneumonia, bacterial or viral? Especially if one or several of the well-wishers standing around him already have the illness?

If the standing out in the rain was not the direct cause, but the proximate one, is that good enough for you? If not, please tell us, doctor, from whence did William Henry contract his fatal case of pneumonia?

Fun fact: My great-grandfather was named William Henry is Harrison's honor.

Joe(I don't know if they called him Bill or Willy or Hank)Nation

Exactly, Joe.



See your first quote. How the hell would I know how he contracted pneumonia(QM) I`m not a doctor.

But cold doesn`t give a person colds. See your first quote.

JTT: My first quote said "historians have guessed" all you have added to the discussion is the assertion that the pneumonia couldn't have been directly caused by the cold rain.
What was the point of making that point?

Joe(such as it is)Nation

Putting another old wives tale to rest.

Have peace guys.
Joe's talking about the conventional wisdom in the day of and before President Harrison.

The causative agnets that lead to pneumonia are infectious agents: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites (that is, pneumonia is directly caused by microbes and the cold rain only serves as an inducing factor when the patient's immunosystem has already been weakened before suffering the rain). People knew this as a result that Louis Pasteur created microbiology with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. The creation, however, was years after Harrison's death (1841).