In his evidence before the Select Committee of the House
of Lords on Rabies and Hydrophobia, Mr. Victor Horsley stated that the deaths from hydrophobia in Scandinavia reached in one year the total of 181, that that was much higher than any death-rate ever reached in England, and that by the expedient of muzzling the dogs it had been so com- pletely stamped out in Scandinavia, that there was now no hydrophobia there at all. The exact geographical meaning
of the term " Scandinavia " was not explained ; the year was not stated ; and no details were given by which the accuracy of the statement could be tested ; but it was confidently repeated by other witnesses before the same Committee in an equally vague shape. And Mr. Chaplin, the Minister for Agriculture in the present Cabinet, repeated it, and laid great stress upon it, in his reply to the Kentish deputation which waited upon him on January 22nd. But Miss Cobbe, who has got all the Swedish and Norwegian information that can be got from official sources, finds the statement to be wholly legendary. No mortality from hydrophobia, she says, approaching to 181 in a year, or to 81, or to 41, has been found on record in Sweden. No universal muzzling order has ever been issued for either Scandinavia, or Norway, or Sweden, and no stamping out of rabies as the result of a twelve months' muzzling order has ever taken place. Such muzzling orders as there have been, have been small local orders in towns or districts where rabies has appeared. The Chairman of the Medical Office of the Department of Justice wrote last month to M. Lembcke : " For many years no cases of hydrophobia, or rabies, are known to have occurred in Norway, and there exists no universal order that dogs should be muzzled." Professor Wennerhalm, of Stockholm, likewise writes : " The regulations against rabies in Sweden are wholly local." Surely Mr. Chaplin should be questioned afresh about the great Scandinavian rabies myth. Medical science should be a little more careful about its statistics than, so far as we can judge, it cares to be when it has once embarked on the great a priori method of an abstract theory.
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