316 DISEASES OF SWINE 



become convinced that all hog-cholera remedies are a fake, and they 

 are unwilUng to make any further expensive experiments. In 

 many cases the treatment has even been refused when the serum 

 was supplied free of cost, as in the case of the recent United States 

 Government and State experiments. 



Advances in human medicine, with treatment of disease by 

 means of so-called serums, led to awakening of interest in the veter- 

 inary profession along this line of experiment. It was soon realized 

 that if a serum could be produced which would prevent and cure 

 hog-cholera a most wonderful work would have been accomplished ; 

 one that would save millions of dollars to the swine raisers of the 

 United States every year. 



Discovery of Serum. — The first real attempt to produce a suc- 

 cessful serum was initiated by the United States Government in 

 the early part of the present century. As a part in the carrying 

 out of the experiments directed to this end a serum plant was es- 

 tabhshed at Ames, Iowa, and here the birth of the present method 

 of handling hog-cholera took place. Drs. Niles, Dorset, Day, and 

 Shores, of the United States Bureau of Animal Industry, were 

 assigned to duty at this experiment station, and, working on the 

 theory that what was possible in human practice should also be 

 possible in the lower animal, they began an extensive series of 

 experiments, with the ultimate object of developing a remedy that 

 would save the lives of the enormous numbers of swine which were 

 being sacrificed every year throughout the United States. 



These men were taking up a strange and unexplored field, and 

 A^_ their incentive was purely scientific interest and a desire to 

 promote the interests of the farmer and stockman. They had no 

 commercial object in view, and too great credit cannot be given 

 them for the enormous work that they accomplished. In a very 

 unpretentious little plant, located in a woods pasture a few miles 

 out of Ames, and supplied with only the simplest of materials with 

 which to work, these employees of the Bureau of Animal Industry 

 carried out to a successful close a series of experiments that revo- 

 lutionized the management of hog-cholera, and changed it from the 

 most dreaded of animal plagues to one that gives promise of soon 

 becoming a thing of the past. These men had no applause of the 

 multitude or public notoriety to cheer them on, but, unnoticed and 



