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Means of Preventing Hog Cholera. By D. W. Dennis. 



During the spring term of 1894 I gave twelve chapel lectures at Earlham 

 College on the conquest of disease. In one of these lectures I discussed the 

 late cholera pestilence in Hamburg and presented a bulletin like those posted up 

 throughout the city, directing the sterilization by boiling of every article of food 

 and drink and of all infected utensils and clothing. I called attention to the 

 fact that science had not only kept the plague from crossing the ocean, but iiad 

 limited it by a single street in the city of Hamburg itself. 



Mr. Porter Cook, of Wilkinson, Hancock County, was a student with us at 

 that time. His father, Mi-. Lorenzo D. Cook, had lost by hog cholera what he sup- 

 posed was at least 50 per cent, of his hogs for the ten previous years. The disease had 

 been among his hogs every year, and he had lost some years as high as five out of 

 every six. It was the habit of the disease to break out during the summer months 

 among the hogs destined for the following November market. When Mr. Cook 

 returned home at the end of the term he found the disease beginning among their 

 hogs as usual. He at once determined-to try the efTect of sterilizing all the drink- 

 ing water given to the hogs by boiling it with a little corn or wheat in it to give 

 the hogs a relish for it. The two that were then sick of the cholera got well and 

 there has been no cholera on his place since. He has never permitted his hogs 

 to drink anything but boiled water since. 



During last month a neighbor on the west has lost seven out of eighteen ; a 

 neighbor on the north had a hundred head; the cholera broke out among them 

 and he sold all but twenty-five, and of this number he thinks four will recover. 

 A third neighbor has k)St eight out of seventeen. There could not be a more sat- 

 isfactory single experiment tried. 



On a farm that had not for ten years escaped the disease, no case has occurred 

 since the water has been boiled, i. e., for two years, and during these two years 

 every adjoining neighbor has been continuously troubled with the disease. 



Mr. Cook says that his hogs have contracted a liking for boiled water and 

 that they will not drink rain water when it gathers in pools in the fields, but 

 wait for watering time instead. Two other facts which have come to my notice 

 strengthen the view that boiling the water will entirely prevent the disease. A 

 farmer in Wayne County never has had the cholera among his hogs. None of his 

 neighbors' hogs have escaped the disease. Their hogs all drink from the neighbor- 

 hood streams, his from a spring in his field. A farmer near Hillsboro, Ohio, 

 when the disease was prevalent, divided a drove of 100 into two parts ; half 

 he watered from his well and the others at a stream. Of those watered at the 

 well none died; of the others more than half. I have within the last week in- 

 stituted a number of experiments, similar to the one Mr. Cook tried, in different 



