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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



a tabular account of 130 cases of the disease 

 referred to by Mr. Hawkins, it appears that five- 

 sixths of the whole number occurred between 

 eighteen days and three months. Mr. George 

 Rigden, of Canterbury, has lately stated in the 

 Lancet the following remarkable fact : He saw 

 many years ago in one of the hospitals in London 

 two patients who had been bitten at the same 

 time by a cat which had been bitten by a rabid 

 dog. Although the two patients had severally 

 received their bites within a few minutes of each 

 other, the respective outbreaks of hydrophobia 

 were separated by an imterval of two weeks. A 

 like uncertainty of the access of the disease has 

 been noticed among infected dogs. On the night 

 of June 8, 1791, the man in charge of Lord Fitz- 

 william's kennel was much disturbed by fightings 

 among the hounds, and got up several times to 

 quiet them. On each occasion he found the same 

 dog quarreling ; at last, therefore, he shut that 

 dog up by himself, and then there was no further 

 disturbance. On the third day afterward the 

 quarrelsome hound was found to be unequivo- 

 cally rabid, and on the fifth day he died. The 

 whole pack were thereupon separately confined, 

 and watched. Six of the dogs became subse- 

 quently mad, and at the following widely differ- 

 ent intervals from the 8th of June, namely, 23 

 days, 56, 67, 81, 155, and 183 days. 



Much longer periods, however, than any that 

 I have hitherto mentioned are on record. In one 

 instance, which was treated in Guy's Hospital, 

 and the particulars of which were carefully inves- 

 tigated by Doctor (now Sir William) Gull, the 

 disorder broke out more than five years after the 

 patient had been bitten by a pointer-bitch below 

 his left knee. There a scar was visible, and the 

 hydrophobic outbreak was preceded by pain in 

 that spot. In the first volume of the Lancet the 

 case is narrated by Mr. Hale Thompson of a lad 

 who died hydrophobic seven years after a bite by 

 a dog on his right hip, where there remained a 

 cicatrix. For twenty-five months before his death 

 this patient had been in close confinement in pris- 

 on, and out of the way of dogs altogether. 



Long periods of this kind cannot reasonably 

 be regarded as periods of genuine or normal in- 

 cubation. In explanation of them I some forty 

 years ago published certain views of my own, but 

 I do not know that they have been (to use a bar- 

 barous modern term) indorsed by any of my pro- 

 fessional brethren. I imagine that the virus im- 

 planted by the rabid animal may remain lodged 

 in the bitten spot, shut up perhaps in a nodule 

 of lymph, or detained somehow in temporary and 



precarious union with some one of the animal 

 tissues, without entering the blood itself for a 

 longer or shorter time — in some cases, perhaps, 

 never. 1 Some curious facts, fortifying this hypoth- 

 esis of mine, have been noticed respecting an- 

 other animal poison — the vaccine virus. The fol- 

 lowing statement is quoted by Mr. Grove, in the 

 Monthly Journal of Medical Science for Novem- 

 ber, 1853 : 



"A girl, aged fourteen years, was seized with 

 influenza. She complained of pain in each arm at 

 the spots where, when an infant, she bad been 

 vaccinated ; and, in fact, in these places vaccine 

 vesicles now became perfectly developed. An 

 elder sister was re vaccinated with lymph thence 

 obtained ; beautiful vesicles formed, and ran a 

 natural course." 



At the Obstetrical Society of London in 1860, Dr. 

 Hodges stated that — 



" In May, 1854, he vaccinated a little boy three 

 years of age, but the arm did not ' rise' within the 

 usual period. In the following May, however, a 

 vesicle spontaneously formed, with an areola on 

 the seventh and eighth days, gradually declining 

 on the eleventh and twelfth ; a permanent cicatrix, 

 marked by pits, remaining and giving evidence of 

 the genuine vaccine disease." 



If my hypothesis be well founded, it may account 

 for some of the cases in which persons bitten by 

 a rabid dog escape hydrophobia altogether. 



The well-known fact that the bitten spot, 

 wound, or scar, very often becomes the seat of 

 some fresh morbid phenomena (variously spoken 

 of as pain, redness, swelling, coldness, stiffness, 

 numbness, tingling, itching), which spread tow- 

 ard the trunk of the body just before the par- 

 oxysmal symptoms of hydrophobia show them- 

 selves, is strongly in favor of the belief that the 

 poison may lie inert in the place of the original 

 hurt for some time, and then, in some obscure 

 way, get liberated and set afloat in the circulat- 

 ing blood. 



Pain, sensations of pricking, and other pe- 



1 I find that Dr. Anthony Todd Thomson, in the 

 thirteenth volume of the "Medico-Chirurgical Trans- 

 actions, " 1826, has been tiresome enough to forestall 

 me in this suggestion. He is commenting upon a 

 case of hydrophobia caused by the bite of a cat, and 

 he conjectures " that the virus remains dormant in 

 the part where it is deposited by the tooth of the 

 rabid animal, until a certain state of habit renders 

 the nerves in its vicinity susceptible of its influence, 

 and this being communicated, a morbid action is be- 

 gun in these nerves, and extended to the respiratory 

 nerves, which induce the whole train of symptoms 

 constituting the disease." 



