Jennings truly declared: "Those present whose capital stock is not equal to the emergency, are prostrated more or less, according to the amount of sustaining energy which they have in store at the time. Those individuals who are the nearest to bankruptcy in this essential article, fall first and fatally, others hold out longer, some recovering and others dropping off. Here too is to be found the reason why a much larger proportion of the cases that occur in the first stage of an epidemic prove fatal, than in the later stages."--Philosophy of Human Life, p. 115.

Those who are weakest and who are the most heavily toxemic fall first and have less recuperative power. Of these Tilden says: "All they need is a fulminant--in disease a sudden drop of ten or more degrees in temperature, a slight indigestion, a mental shock, fear, etc. A long warm season followed by cold, a long dry season followed by wet weather, bring many to such a state of enervation that the change becomes the fulminant--the last straw--that starts an epidemic."--Philosophy of Health, April, 1923.

People free of toxemia and gastro-intestinal catarrh with putrefaction, whose mucous membranes, are all healthy, are fully resistant to any epidemic influence. From that large part of our population who are toxemic and putrescence-poisoned, epidemics develop. Law and order play no favorites and admit no exceptions. If the "epidemic influence" were the cause of the epidemic, then all who come within its range would develop the "epidemic disease." There is a good and sufficient reason why there are those who pass through the worst plague epidemics unharmed. Health is the great (and only) immunizer, and health is based on good habits. A sound organism with full nerve force repudiates pathogenic influences. If "disease" is contagious and every one is healthy, how can disease be "caught"?

In every epidemic the severity of the type ranges from extremely mild to fatal cases. Under any and all schemes of treatment, from rational to absurd--from expectant, watchful waiting to heroic dosing--people get well and die in keeping with their vital tenacity. Not the "epidemic influence," but the condition of the sick person determines this.

In human epidemics the psychology of fear prolongs and intensifies the epidemic by further enervating so that many develop the "disease" who would not except for this last straw--fear--that breaks the camel's back-- resistance. The hullabaloo by newspapers and health doctors about epidemics, vaccination, daily death rates, new cases, etc., produce panic and the less enervated and toxemic become ill. "When fear from newspaper scare-lines and health-board reports of "astonishment," "mystery" and inability to find the germ are added, the fearful and impressionable, those who lack knowledge and poise, go down.

After a crop of colds start, add fear, stupid medication, nursing and feeding; then colds, (coryza), rhinitis, pharyngitis, tonsillitis, laryngitis, and pneumonia and death are as natural as the "disease" is "mysterious" and "astonishing" to well-educated physicians. Every epidemic comes as a surprise to doctors because they do not know the causes of epidemics.

Mass hysteria, as exhibited in religious excitement, is instanced by Graham, as examples of the pathogenic effects of fear and anxiety aroused by the "fearful expectation of the presence and action of a mysterious agent." He gives examples of how this so affects the organs and functions of the body as to prostrate the victim. He points out, too, how each additional victim of the suggestion-induced panic "powerfully increases the predisposition of the body for such an effect." Of one such phenomenon he says: "The excitement extended and increased--and the phenomenon of falling down in a swoon became truly epidemic." This epidemic spread over a large part of New England. Some of the frenzied victims of this epidemic were "nearly paralyzed in their bodily powers."

He emphasized that "certain actions of the mind may produce certain conditions of the nervous system, causing corresponding effects on t|he organs and functions of the body; and that when peculiar causes have produced peculiar phenomena, and the causes are fully believed to be general, mysterious and irresistable, and the phenomena the necessary results of the action of those causes, the mind of all, coming under the strong and continued excitement, may so act on the bodily sympathies, and through them, on the organs and tissues, as absolutely to induce the same involuntary phenomena in most or all, and thus render them extensively epidemic."--Cholera, p. 29.

He believed that after "long continued abuses have reduced the vital energies of the nerves of organic life to a very low level, in a great portion of the people, and a particular type of 'disease' develops in some, fear and anxiety and panic are alone sufficient to keep up an epidemic disease," and also that by "acting on those of better habits," fear and frenzy may so "debilitate the nerves of organic life, and so disturb the various functions of the system," and predispose these individuals to "take on disease" which "being improperly treated, may terminate either in the prevailing disease itself, or one which shall so assimilate itself, in all its symptoms, to the prevailing disease, that it will be unhesitatingly pronounced the same, and thus, epidemic disease may not only range over the level of its origin, but also frequently undermine and sweep away many in the higher orders of habit and condition."

The alarm produced by the "new and terrible disease" that "everybody talks about" and the symptoms of which are "carefully observed and published in the newspapers," and handed on by "the ten thousand tongues of busy rumor," and "listened to with deepest sensibility by the ten thousands ears of fearful anxiety," produces "universal panic" causing hundreds, perhaps thousands "in the delirium of fear," to pour down "fatal quantities of brandy, laudanum" and other "remedies" "corresponding in violence with the supposed power and malignity of the cause of the disease" and "plunge drunken and stupified into the forced embrace of death."

"We know" he says, "that overwhelming fear, by arresting at once all the functions of life, may cause instantaneous death; and we know that violent and continued fear" and "brooding anxiety," will prostrate the strongest.

Fear is a child of ignorance. Knowledge alone can immunize us against fear of "disease" or of epidemics. Teach people that only the man who has built himself into a seething • compost, by wrong living, is in line for the development of any of the so-called "communicable diseases" and that no immunization scheme--no plan of vicarious salvation--can take the place of right living, and they will no longer fear "disease." The human mind is prone to throw obscurity and fearful mystery over subjects that are far from being mysterious. Correct knowledge alone can cure this tendency.