Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1915 — ODD FACTS ABOUT CHOLERA [ARTICLE]

ODD FACTS ABOUT CHOLERA

Superstition Has Added to Ravages of Dread Disease —How Rook* Were Affected. Cholera has usually found a useful ally in superstition. In the old days the disease was believed to lie bottled up in volcanoes and to be released by eruptions. The most effectual way to avoid it was to sleep In bed with your head due south. In Russia during the terrible epidemics six years ago the peasants would not trust the doctors, whom they actually accused of causing the disease, but drank a fearful mixture of tar, resin and petroleum as preventives, and fired guns from the doors and windows to scare the cholera away. What spreads the disease along the caravan routes of Asia is the habit of washing dirty clothes in the drinking wells. Rooks were the birds whose conduct in connection with the cholera was observed in Ireland in 1832. According to the contemporary Dublin Morning Register, immediately the cholera came all the birds vanished from the rookery in the Marquis of Sligo's demesne, one of the largest in Ireland. “For three weeks, during which the disease raged violently, these noisy tenants of the trees completely deserted their lofty habitations. In the meantime the revenue police found immense numbers of them lying dead upon the shore near Erris, about ten miles distant Upon the decline of the malady, within the last few days, several of the old birds have again appeared in the neighborhood of the rookery, but some of them seemed unable, through exhaustion, to reach their nests.”