"The water theory is too absurd and ridiculous to have any significance. There is not an authority to be found for its assumption. It is yet to be explained how water could possibly have such an effect, while all the knowledge modern science has amassed goes to provide the belief merely an antiquated superstition, to which some people still cling.

"When Pasteur's boom was exploded, and the public went wild with enthusiasm over it, along with the great majority of scientific men, I was also taken in by the contagion. At the time I was impressed that with the increasing knowledge gained in the field of contagious and epidemic diseases generally, much substantial advance has not been recorded in the history of the mysterious rabies, but realizing that this was not due to neglect of the subject, I was not surprised at the birth of the Pasteur theory.

"Owing to the terrible nature of the symptoms attributed to this unfounded malady, an attractive field of research has been open to those animated by an earnest desire to prevent and relieve human sufferings from the time of the earliest civilization. The symptoms are described in the works of Horace, Aristotle, Virgil and Plutarch, in a manner which shows that while the world has advanced in all other lines of medical science it is pitifully behind the date in clinging to this relic of the queer superstition of ancient times.

"Pasteur was fascinated - or shall I say hypnotized? - by the sensationalism and mystery of the belief. It is most likely due to the latter element that the universe has not become emancipated from such superstitions as are involved in the 'rabies' or hydrophobia hoax, which really belong to medieval history.

"Take a practical, up-to-date view of the matter. All epidemic disorders should be. accompanied with evidences approaching in exactitude, at least, a degree of mathematical proof. 'Rabies' has not, while all others have. The symptoms observed during life, as well as the signs found in the dead body, in such diseases as smallpox, typhus fever and cholera, for instance, are characteristic, decisive and constant. The symptoms in 'rabies' in man are extremely vague, conflicting and , inconsistent, and, furthermore, post-mortem study in man, as well as in canine, has yielded no result of other than negative value.

"Much of the observation made of queer-acting dogs is made through optics disturbed by fear, and by persons who are incompetent to judge what they see, 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 uncermoniously 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 themselves 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.

"I 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 intestinal disease; nay, even by healthy dogs. The seriousness and oft-times fatal influence 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 influences of mind on the body.

"From as far back as the fifteenth century, when the Alsatian pheasants imagined they were changed to wolves, ran on all fours, howling demonically and tearing children to pieces, and insisting that their limbs be lopped off in order to convince others that the wolfish fur grew inward from their skins, to the present day when those dreading hydrophobia bark and snarl like dogs, mew and spit like cats and are thrown into convulsions at sight of water, the records of the disorder are replete to overflowing with delusion, superstition, hysteria and unconscious simulation.

"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 suggested 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 years ago, when Pasteurism was popularized in the country, I carefully followed up all the newspaper and medical journal reports of alleged outbreaks of the malady, and in not a single case was satisfactory evidence of its existence 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.