Medicine: Sick Sausages

Last autumn, before moving his 18 children, 13 grandchildren and divers in-laws from their drought-blighted farmstead in North Dakota to a 19-room house at Columbia Falls, Mont., Antone Hoerner killed & cured enough hogs to make sausages and ham to carry them through the winter. Shortly before Christmas nine well-fed Hoerners simultaneously took sick at their stomachs, vomited, developed fever. Doctors thought that they had eaten apples from which poisonous insecticide had not been thoroughly washed. As more Hoerners took sick with the same symptoms, doctors suspected typhoid fever. But by the time ten-year-old Daniel Hoerner died, doctors knew that an...

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