But none of this stopped the opponents of the Chinese from making outrageous claims. Some white doctors lent credibility to the anti-Chinese movement by suggesting that the Chinese brought inexplicable diseases to the United States. Back in 1862, Dr. Arthur Stout had published Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation, arguing that the Chinese posed a serious health hazard. In 1875, the American Medical Association even supported a study that attempted to measure the role of Chinese prostitutes in spreading syphilis in the United States—an investigation that turned up nothing unusual. The absence of hard facts, however, did not deter the president of the AMA from charging that “even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches,” or prevent a medical journal from publishing an editorial under the title “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood.” If data could not be found to substantiate certain claims, doctors enthralled and inflamed by racial hostility heightened the public’s terror by resorting to nonscientific, mythic images of the Chinese. As one historian observed, many experts from that era considered Chinese disease as “the result of thousands of years of beastly vices, resistant to all efforts of modern medicine.” (Chang 123)