Rat Blood

If a man be ridden with a great weight of sleep, as one who has tasted mandragora, so that his eyes glue themselves together, and all his functions are dried up in drowsiness, the blood of a rat poured into his veins may avail to remove the curse and call back the soul into his body.

This is not a quotation from an archaic book on medicine. It is a theory put forward by Dr. W. H. Taliaferro of the University of Chicago, who has been experimenting with rat blood as a cure for sleeping sickness. "Rats are immune to sleeping sickness," says he. "There are evidences that they produce certain immune bodies in their blood which will have an important bearing on the eradication of the disease."