1895.] The Skunk as a Source of Rabies. 243 
York Sun, about six months since, had a most blood-curdling 
story of many soldiers in Mississippi dying from the bite of a 
skunk, and the deaths spread over a period of several months, 
a marvelously long-lived skunk to live a month after rabies 
had developed to the stage of being communicable, and in- 
quiries in Mississippi showed that no fatal case of skunk bite 
was ever known there, although skunks were BOID UENMA kept 
as vermin killers. 
Now remember that this story drew all the weight it could 
have from the allegation that Dr. Janeway had endorsed it, and 
remember further, that the belief was that the skunk, at pres- 
ent, had this power. At last I was able to get Dr. Janeway’s 
paper, which was published in The Medical Record of New 
York, March 13, 1875, and a more ridiculous breaking down 
of a ridiculous myth I never saw. 
It appears that Dr. Janeway was stationed at Fort Hays, 
Kansas, when an epidemic of rabies broke out in the sur- 
rounding country, and his paper in the Medical Record was 
based on his report to the Surgeon-General of the U.S. Army ; 
and in a letter to me he says that after writing this paper to 
' the Medical Record, he endeavored to trace the origin of the 
epidemic, and if he remembers aright, found by inquiries that 
it was first noticed in the northern tier of Texas counties, and 
travelled north by west to the Fort Hays reservation. 
So far from Dr. Janeway stating that any skunk could con- 
vey rabies, he distinctly refuted the assertions of some clergy- 
man to this effect, citing instances of dogs and men being bit- 
ten by a skunk without injury (and one case wherein one 
person died and two escaped unhurt from the bite of the same 
rabid wolf). Dr. Janeway gives a very qualified adhesion to 
the belief that the bite of a rabid. skunk was fatal in a larger 
proportion of instances than the bite of other animals, and 
thus explains it: 
“ That more cases, proportionally, may result fatally from 
the bite of this animal than from the bite of rabid dogs and 
wolves, is probably, if not actually, the case; still there are 
obvious reasons for it to be so. An animal, nocturnal in its 
habits, generally timid, but armed with a powerful battery to 
