No. 4.] RATS AND RAT RIDDx\NCE. 191 



fight savagely when cornered, and may inflict infectious wounds, 

 as I know from personal experience, the cases where they make 

 unprovoked attacks on human beings are rare. Under some 

 circumstances a swarm of hungry rats might attack a man in 

 the dark, but probably most of the narratives of such occur- 

 rences are much overdrawn. Nevertheless, it is true that 

 sleepers, particularly infants, have been bitten, and in some 

 cases such attacks may have resulted fatally from infection 

 carried on the teeth of the rat. This constitutes a real though 

 rather remote danger which should be guarded against. 



I have investigated the cases of three persons, now living, 

 who have been bitten by rats while asleep, — one while an 

 infant, the other two in youth. The chairman of a city board 

 of health still bears scars on his forehead, the result of such an 

 attack, but the most recent fatal occurrence of this kind that 

 has come to my notice is that of a newly born infant. This 

 child was born to Mrs. Frank W. Silver of 57 Clovelly Street, 

 Lynn, at a hospital, on the morning of September 5, 1914. 

 During the next night the nurse left for a time the room in 

 which the baby lay, heard the child cry and hurrying back 

 saw a rat jump from the bed. The infant's head was bleeding 

 and it died at about 3 a.m. September 8. One of the Boston 

 papers contained a long account of the occurrence, in which it 

 asserted that District Attorney Henry C. Attwill had ordered 

 an autopsy to determine the cause of death. 



A few days later an item appeared, part of which follows: — 



Lynn, September 11. — That the death at a hospital Tuesday of the 

 two-day-old infant of Mr. and Mrs. Frank W. Silver of 57 Clovelly Street 

 was due to the bite of a rat was the conclusion reached to-day by Med- 

 ical Examiner Magrath of Boston, who made a pathological examination 

 of the organs of the infant. After hearing from Dr. Magrath, Medical 

 Examiner O'Shea signed the death certificate, and attributed the death 

 to poisoning, resulting from the rat bite. 



The only error in this item seems to be the statement that 

 the child was but two days old. It was nearly three days 

 old. 



In order to determine whether the newspaper reports were 

 warranted by facts, I wrote to Dr. O'Shea, who kindly sent me 

 a statement of the findings of the medical examiner at the 



