FICTION
205
As to Dr. Palmer Fuerst's lecture , "Rabies and Race ," I think
it an indication of Josiah Slade's tormented state of mind, that he
should so suddenly recall the dread disease, in its hideous
symptoms, yet forget entirely,-indeed, if he ever grasped-the
challenging medical and scientific propositions, advanced by Dr.
Fuerst and his colleagues in research!
This lecture was given, I believe, on the top floor of old
Dickinson Hall, which at that time possessed the largest lecture-hall
at the University; and it was fairly well attended, despite the
infelicity of its scheduling,-mid-afternoon of the Friday of the
Princeton-Yale football game , to be played in New Haven . In this
limited space I cannot of course do justice to Dr. Fuerst's eloquent
presentation,-for which, I hope the reader will forgive me.
The substance of "Rabies and Race" here follows.
In late spring of 1895, it seems , in the impoverish'd hill
community of Jellyby, Massachusetts, the sixteen-year-old son of a
potato farmer, of no particular distinction, was stricken, of a
sudden, with fever, and quickly grew so weak, he could not complete
his day ' s task in the field: but was brought home to bed. There, he
suffered such hideous symptoms as frenzy, excessive salivation,
spasmodic breath, violent headache , inability to speak coherently,
inability to swallow either solids or liquids, and, not least, gradually
accelerating terror, which threw the poor boy into convulsions. He
soon slipped, mercifully, into a coma, from which he never woke:
indeed, he died but forty-eight hours later, leaving not only his
astounded family, but all of Jellyby, o'ercome with grief and
apprehension .
Jellyby being both remote and unenlightened,-its nearest
"city," some seventy-five miles to the south, is Pittsfield-there was
a very strong likelihood, that this tragic instance might have been
passed off, by an ignorant country doctor, as mere influenza, or
somesuch commonplace disease: but an alert county coroner, insist–
ing upon an autopsy, sent his findings to a Boston laboratory,–
whereupon it was discovered, that the boy had died of
rabies.
Alas, rabies!-that most dreaded of disorders , about which so
little was known, in 1895, and so much was feared!-for is any
illness so cruel, so unremitting, so pitiless, and so cunning; does any
illness known to man so challenge our faith in the Deity, and our
confidence , that Jesus Christ is our ordained Savior, and that not
even a sparrow falls , without the eye of God attending-?
