[Illustration: Saved by Antitoxin] _Which Shall Live――Men or Animals?_ _Reprinted from Hygeia, October, 1923_ _Copyright, 1923 American Medical Association, 535 N. Dearborn St., Chicago_ WHICH SHALL LIVE――MEN OR ANIMALS? ERNEST HAROLD BAYNES If the United States were threatened with invasion by a foreign power, even if we knew that the invasion would be only temporary and that only a few thousand of our citizens would be killed, the whole country would be aroused in an effort to prevent that invasion. If necessary, millions of men would be drafted and trained to meet the invaders and billions of dollars would be expended to protect those few thousand people from the death that must otherwise overtake them. In such a case, every real man and every real woman in the country would be doing something to insure the defeat of that invading army. Yet such an army is like a box of tin soldiers compared with armies that threaten us all the time, but which cause scarcely an extra beat of the nation’s pulse. I refer to the armies of disease. The army of bubonic plague alone, if permitted to effect a foothold on our shores, might at any time ravage our cities as it once ravaged the cities of Europe and Asia, leaving scarcely enough living to bury the dead. We read in DeFoe’s “History of the Plague” in London in 1665 of “people in the rage of their distemper or in the torment of their swellings, which were indeed intolerable, running out of their own government, raving and distracted, and often times laying violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out of windows, shooting themselves, mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy.” Indeed, we do not have to go back so far to realize what the plague can do. In 1905 in India alone there were 1,040,429 deaths from this one disease. THE CONQUEST OF BUBONIC PLAGUE