HYDROPHOBIA AND RABIES. 



219 



admitted into St. George's Hospital since he first 

 knew it twenty-five years earlier. Now, mention 

 of such cases is constantly being made in the 

 newspapers. Since the beginning of the present 

 year, no less than thirteen deaths from hydro- 

 phobia have been recorded within the limits of 

 the London Registration. 



So many erroneous notions are afloat on this 

 subject, that it may be neither uninteresting nor 

 useless to the general reader to have a plain, un- 

 technical history of the two diseases, which are 

 inseparably connected by reciprocal relationship, 

 the one being the parent of the other. In the 

 canine race rabies can propagate rabies ; but hy- 

 drophobia does not (as I believe) ever reproduce 

 itself. 



The first thing to be noticed about hydro- 

 phobia is, that, frequent as it has become, many 

 medical men pass through life without witnessing 

 the disease at all. Hence there has, strangely 

 enough, sprung up in some minds a fancy that 

 no such disease has ever happened. Sir Isaac 

 Pennington, who was in my time the Regius 

 Professor of Physic at Cambridge, and who had 

 never seen a case of hydrophobia, could not be 

 persuaded that any one else had seen anything 

 more than a nervous disorder, produced by the 

 alarmed imagination of persons who, having been 

 bitten by a dog reputed to be mad, and having 

 the fear of feather-beds before their eyes, have 

 been frightened into a belief that they were la- 

 boring under hydrophobia, and ultimately scared 

 out of their very existence. It was at that time 

 currently believed, at least by the vulgar, that 

 any one afflicted with this terrible disorder was 

 dangerous to those about him ; and it was cus- 

 tomary for his neighbors, or associates, to put an 

 end at once to his woes and to their own cowardly 

 dread of him by smothering him between two 

 feather-beds. 



But a far more eminent man than the Cam- 

 bridge professor, even Sir George Cornewall 

 Lewis, was possessed with a similar incredulity 

 on this subjeet, until convinced of his error by 

 Mr. Hawkins, who had then seen eleven or twelve 

 cases of hydrophobia — a larger number than per- 

 haps any man in this country ever saw before or 

 since. One reason for this was that he had re- 

 ceived from Sir Robert Ker Porter, our minister in 

 South America, specimens of a substance called 

 guaco, a supposed preventive and cure of hydro- 

 phobia and of snake-bites, and had on that ac- 

 count been summoned to cases of hydrophobia 

 by various other practitioners. 



I have myself seen four cases of that fear- 



ful malady, and I feel sure that no one who has 

 even once watched its actual symptoms could 

 fail to recognize it again, or could mistake 

 any other malady for it, or wish to witness it 

 thereafter. What these truly remarkable symp- 

 toms are I shall explain presently. It would, 

 a priori, seem incredible that so many persons 

 who have been bitten by mad dogs should have 

 suffered so precisely the same train of symp- 

 toms, and have at last died, from the mere force 

 of a morbid imagination. But a single fact con- 

 clusive against such a belief is that the disease 

 has befallen infants and idiots, who had never 

 heard or understood a word about mad dogs or 

 hydrophobia, and in whom the imagination could 

 have had no share in producing their fatal dis- 

 temper. 



The steady increase in the population of this 

 kingdom implies a corresponding, though per- 

 haps not proportional, increase in the number of 

 its dogs. In this way the area is ever growing 

 larger of a field ready for the reception of the 

 poisonous germ of rabies, and for the production 

 in due time of a more or less copious crop of 

 hydrophobia. The report for this year of the 

 Postmaster-General contains the strange state- 

 ment made by the local postmaster of a large 

 town in the north of England, that in the year 

 1876 twenty per cent, of his men — one in every 

 five — were bitten by dogs. A parliamentary re- 

 turn of last session tells us that in the year end- 

 ing with last May, 973 sheep and lambs were 

 killed by dogs in ten of the counties of Scotland, 

 and in most cases the owners of the dogs could 

 not be discovered. There is in London a Home 

 for stray and lost dogs. It has been affirmed in 

 print by the well-known Secretary to the Society 

 for Preventing Cruelty to Animals, that upward of 

 1,500 dogs are taken to this Home every month. 

 It is notorious that the tax on dogs is evaded to 

 an enormous extent. All this serves to disclose 

 the presence among us of a national nuisance, and 

 a growing source of national dishonesty and of 

 serious national peril. It is grievous to me to 

 have to write in a strain so depreciatory of a race 

 of animals that I love so well. But corruptio 

 optimi pessima. It is an illustrative fact that, ac- 

 cording to the Reports of the Registrar-General, 

 no less than 334 persons died in England of 

 hydrophobia in the decade of years ending with 

 1875. 



Like other specific contagious diseases, hy- 

 drophobia has its period of incubation; and it is 

 a somewhat variable period, lying for the most 

 part between six weeks and three months. From 



