In the 1940s Jules Freund, inventor of Freund's adjuvant, worked on developing antibodies in horse to rabbit serum globulin. In a 1947 Journal of Experimental Medicine study, Freund describes the horses by number: 1026, 999, 1127. To others, they had names like Sylvester, Moses, and Doc Fried.
The horses had retired from the New York City police department to reside at stables on a 170-acre plot of land in the tiny town of Otisville, NY, 80 miles from midtown Manhattan in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains. New York City has been sending horses to Otisville since 1906. On this same land is the 10,000-square foot Otisville Complex. The New York City Department of Health originally owned it as a municipal sanitarium for tuberculosis, and the complex and land were home in the first decades of the 20th century to research that developed antitoxin to diphtheria. Horse serum produced the ...
