We hear occasionally of this disease in the mountains of Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming. It is supposed to be produced by the bite of a tick. The disease begins with chill, fever, and severe pain in the limbs. A rash appears from the second to the seventh day. Sometimes there is bleeding. Those who have seen the disease declare the rash to be not unlike that of typhus fever. Some patients have hemorrhage from the mucous membrane. The temperature ranges from 103° to 105° F. When the fever runs very high, there is delirium and stupor. The death-rate in this disease is very great. It is said to run as high as seventy per cent in Montana, but in Idaho not more than two or three per cent. The discrepancy is so great that there must be a very decided difference in the types of the disease found in the two states.

The disease should yield to the ordinary treatment of fasting, bathing, washing the bowels every day, and absolute quiet. When the temperature runs high, give a warm bath, reduced by cooling the water to 40°. The patient should be kept in the bath long enough to reduce his temperature to, 101° or 102° F. This should be done twice a day until the temperature stays below 102°. There is no question but that there must be a septic state. A hyperpyrexia, or high grade of fever, must be overcome to prevent the disease from becoming intense.

We have given this as you will find it in books on the subject, but our belief is, that it is psychological. Doctors scare the patients to death. As soon as people in the Rocky Mountain country find a tick on them, they get the jitters. After a doctor has been called and gives his treatment, the patient is certainly sick. We must not forget that we can kill people by building a psychological pathology. If it were possible for people to call a physician who would make fun of the tick fever, and encourage the patient to understand there is nothing to it further than what follows the bite of the ticks of the middle states, we would bear very little of the mountain fever in a short time. We still believe in the mad dog insanity. This is tick insanity, and if we can keep insanity out of our disease the mortality will drop exceedingly low in a very short time.