484 



HYDROPHOBIA. 



tellect in the affairs of life, there was a touch of 

 insanity in his art. He boasted of noble blood, 

 but delighted in the daily exercise of a skill 

 in manual labor that would not have discred- 

 ited the handicraftsmen from whom he was 

 descended. His days were stormy, but they 

 closed in peace and honor. His eightieth 

 birthday was like a national fete ; his country- 

 men hailed him as the greatest poet of France, 

 and the singers of the world did homage to him 

 as the master-spirit of the age. When he died, 

 the nation gave him a public funeral ; and he 

 who had entered public life as the pet of a 

 Bourbon king, passed away as the idol of the 

 French Republic. 



HYDROPHOBIA. Within the past year, the 

 etiological history of rabies has been brought 

 very near its conclusion, through the labors of 

 the French savant, Louis Pasteur. Up to this 

 time, many writers have denied that rabies is 

 a contagious disease by which is meant, a 

 disease whose origin is lost to us, and which 

 in our day only develops in an animal organ- 

 ism, never outside of it, and can only be com- 

 municated by means of material from a dis- 

 eased animal, either by what is termed natural 

 infection, or by accident, or by intentional in- 

 oculation. M. Pasteur has proved that rabies 

 is a contagious disease, pure and simple. 



In one important respect, rabies under natu- 

 ral conditions differs from all other known con- 

 tagious diseases : viz., the uncertainty and ir- 

 regularity of what is known as the period of 

 latency. The extreme limits of this period are 

 considered to be from thirty days to two years, 

 although some apocryphal cases have been re- 

 ported where the period was longer. It has 

 been asserted that when the period of generali- 

 zation begins, the bitten dog is frequently seen 

 to gnaw at the seat of the original wound, and 

 that human beings under the same circum- 

 stances have complained of similar sensations, 

 and that such places again become reddened as 

 if irritated. Judging from our observations, 

 we must conclude that the infectious elements 

 must remain localized during the period of la- 

 tency ; when any constitutional disturbance ap- 

 pears, it is an indication that these elements 

 have begun to proliferate, and to be dispersed 

 over the organism, when they manifest them- 

 selves by disturbance of the phenomena of 

 those parts for which they seem to have the 

 greatest physiological affinity, which in rabies 

 are the great nerve-centers, the brain and the 

 spinal cord. 



It is due to Pasteur that we now know ex- 

 actly the ^actual duration of the period of in- 

 cubation in canine rabies. He assumed that, 

 as the most striking phenomena in this disease 

 were disturbances in the functions of the great 

 nervous centers, these offered the best localities 

 from which to obtain material for the end de- 

 sired. In assuming the nervous centers to be 

 the only or chief seat of the rabid virus, there 

 is some reason to believe, from clinical evi- 

 dence alone, that Pasteur has gone too far. It 



is a well-known fact that the saliva of the 

 rabid dog is, in general, the only medium by 

 which rabies is communicated to other animals 

 through a bite. This saliva is full of all kinds 

 of microbic organisms, and to isolate any spe- 

 cific one, as in rabies, especially when it is sup- 

 posed to be a coccus, from such material, would 

 be a matter of the extremest difficulty, though 

 always possible. Nevertheless, the saliva does 

 contain the rabid elements, beyond all doubt. 

 These elements must be in it before it enters 

 the mouth, so that we are justified in conclud- 

 ing that they must be contained in the great 

 salivary glands, in fully as pure and powerful 

 a condition as in the nervous material of the 

 brain and cord. It seems to have been an 

 oversight not to place salivary fistulse on the 

 ducts of these glands in rabid animals, and lead 

 their contents into appropriately sterilized re- 

 ceivers. The glands themselves should be used 

 as material for examination and cultivation; 

 the medium for the same should be their secre- 

 tions, which can be used in either a solid or 

 liquid form. M. Pasteur not only assured the 

 writer that he had never been able to discover 

 any specific microbe in rabies, far less cultivate 

 it and produce the disease with it as did also 

 M. le Dr. Roux, his assistant but expressed 

 the greatest skepticism with regard to some so- 

 called successful experiments made by Dr. Fol 

 of Geneva, recently published in abstract. In 

 the face of such assertions, it has been published 

 that " the microbe of the saliva is very easily 

 cultivated, and successive cultures can be easily 

 made in veal infusions " ; that Thuillier, the 

 lamented assistant of Pasteur, who died of 

 cholera in Egypt in 1884, "had had the pa- 

 tience to make eighty cultures in contact with 

 the air, and eighty cultures in vacuum ; and 

 the eightieth culture killed as quickly as the 

 first." 



Pasteur, looking upon the nervous elements 

 of the brain and spinal cord as the chief seat 

 of the disease-producing elements in rabies, 

 proved this idea to be correct by inoculating 

 healthy dogs in the brain with brain-substance 

 from rabid ones. The method of performing 

 this operation is the same as that resorted to 

 in ordinary trephining of the cranium i. e., 

 the skin is first cut through down on to the 

 bone ; then, with a trephining instrument hav- 

 ing the diameter of a common lead-pencil, a 

 round piece of the skull is removed very care- 

 fully so as not to disturb the membranes under- 

 neath. The brain-substance from the rabid 

 dog is then removed by cutting into the brain 

 with a sterilized knife, and then making a side 

 cut into the same with another, and removing 

 a small piece, which is carefully rubbed up in 

 sterilized bouillon or distilled water. The fluid 

 must not be filtered. A common morphine 

 syringe is then filled, the needle being curved, 

 and an amount of fluid corresponding to two 

 or three divisions of the piston carefully in- 

 jected under the cerebral membranes, 

 result was that rabies appeared in dogs thus 



