180 EVERVTHING ABOtJf BOCS. 



consequently if a canine froth at the mouth, run with his tongue out and carry 

 his tail drawn under his body he has the rabies, and the revolver or policeman's 

 polished baton is unceremoniously called into service. 



"What nonsense! Such signs have been observed in dogs that have merely 

 been chased or beaten, or that are afflicted with ordinary canine diseases. What if 

 they are taken to a water trough and go into convulsions when they see the liquid. 

 They are overheated and at a high tension of nervous excitement. Accordingly they 

 conceive a craving for water, yet in such a state they are unable to compose them- 

 selves sufficiently to partake of it, and so the unquenchable craving throws them 

 into the dreadful paroxysms which decides their fate. 



"The same explanation serves for the supposed sufferers of rabies in man. Any 

 human being suspected to be infected with rabies who is mentally weak enough to 

 work up a like nervous excitement to that I have just cited in the canine will suffer 

 parallel symptoms; the others bitten by so-called rabid mad dogs will suffer no ill 

 effects unless it be from blood poisoning, infected by decayed teeth in the animal's 

 mouth. In the latter case the water symptoms do not present themselves if the 

 afflicted are strong enough in mind to keep control of their nervous systems. 



"1 believe that many of the sufferers who develop the imaginary diseases were 

 bitten by animals suffering not from rabies, but from epilepsy or from gastro intes- 

 tinal disease; nay, even by healthy dogs. The seriousness and oft-times fatal in- 

 fluence of terror and expectant attention, fostered by the excitement of popular 

 alarm is equally attested by other epidemics of imitative nervous disorder, and is a 

 familiar fact to those who have carefully and scientifically studied the possible in- 

 fluences of mind on the body. 



"From as far back as the fifteenth century, when the Alsatian peasants imag- 

 ined they were changed to wolves, ran on all fours, howling demonically and tear- 

 ing children to pieces, and insisting that their limbs be lopped off in order to con- 

 vince others thut the wolfish fur grew inward from their &kins, to the present day 

 when those dreading hydrophobia bark and snarl like dogs, mew and spit like cats 

 and are thrown into coip.ulsioms at sight of water, the records of the disorder are 

 replete to overflowing with delusion, superstition, hysteria and unconscious simu- 

 lation. 



"The tragi-comical case of a number of persons dying in the sixteenth century, 

 after having eaten of a pig that had been bitten by a dog, which in turn had been 

 bitten by another and believed to be a rabid one, found its counterpart a short time 

 ago in Russia, where a medical editor and a prominent follower of Pasteur sug- 

 gested the treating of a number of persons in the Pasteur Institute at Odessa for no 

 better reason than that they had partaken of milk from a cow bitten by a suspicious 

 acting dog. 



"In order to determine how great the danger from 'rabies' was in the United 

 States about ten year > ago, when Pasteurism was popularized in the country, I care- 

 fully followed up all the newspaper and medical journal reports of alleged out- 

 breaks of the malady, and in not a single case was satisfactory evidence of its exist- 

 ence obtained. The reported outbreaks were mostly located in or near two centers, 

 Newark and Chicago. In the epidemic at Niles Centre, seven miles from Chicago, 

 which led to a wild hunt and 'slaughter of the innocent canines in that village, the 

 human subjects were successfully cured by the 'madstone' a harmless species of 

 the 'faith cure' in this case. But the subsidence of the panic was mostly due to a 

 sensible physician who declined to make a premature diagnosis. 



"At Newark, scientific tests were made, which showed that neither the per- 

 sons dying of alleged 'rabies,' the dogs that had bitten them, nor the children re- 



