190 HYDROPHOBIA 



science it is pitifully behind the date in clinging to this relic of the queer 

 superstition of ancient times. 



"Pasteur was fascinated — or shall I say hypnotized? — by the sensa- 

 tionalism and mystery of the belief. It is most likely due to the latter 

 element that the universe has not become emancipated from such super- 

 stitions as are involved in the 'rabies' or hydrophobia hoax, which really 

 belong to medieval history. 



"Take a practical, up-to-date view of the matter. All epidemic dis- 

 orders should be accompanied with evidences approaching in exactitude, 

 at least, a degree of mathematical proof. 'Rabies' has not, while all others 

 have. The symptoms observed during life, as well as the signs found in 

 the dead body, in such diseases as smallpox, typhus fever and cholera, for 

 instance, are characteristic, decisive and constant. The symptoms in 'rabies' 

 in man are extremely vague, conflicting and , inconsistent, and, further- 

 more, post-mortem study in man, as well as in canine, has yielded no re- 

 sult of other than negative value. 



"Much of the observation made of queer-acting dogs is made through 

 optics disturbed by fear, and by persons who are incompetent to judge 

 what they see, consequently if a canine froth at the mouth, run with his 

 tongue out and carry his tail drawn under his body he has the rabies, and 

 the revolver or policeman's polished baton is uncermoniously called into 

 service. 



"What nonsense! Such signs have been observed in dogs that have 

 merely been chased or beaten, or that are afflicted with ordinary canine 

 diseases. What if they are taken to a water trough and go into convulsions 

 when they see the liquid. They are overheated and at a high tension 

 of nervous excitement. Accordingly they conceive a craving for water, yet 

 in such a state they are unable to compose themselves sufficiently to par- 

 take of it, and so the unquenchable craving throws them into the dread- 

 ful paroxysms which decides their fate. 



"The same explanation serves for the supposed sufferers of rabies in 

 man. Any human being suspected to be infected with rabies who is men- 

 tally weak enough to work up a like nervous excitement to that I have 

 j-ust cited in the canine will suffer parallel symptoms; the others bitten 

 by so-called rabid mad dogs will suffer no ill effects unless it be from 

 blood poisoning, infected by decayed teeth in the animal's mouth. In the 

 latter case the water symptoms do not present themselves if the afflicted 

 are strong enough in mind to keep control of their nervous systems. 



"I believe that many of the sufferers who develop the imaginary dis- 

 eases were bitten by animals suffering not from rabies, but from epilepsy 

 or from gastro intestinal disease; nay, even by healthy dogs. The serious- 

 ness and oft-times fatal influence of terror and expectant attention, fos- 

 tered by the excitement of popular alarm is equally attested by other 

 epidemics of imitative nervous disorder, and is a familiar fact to those 

 who have carefully and scientifically studied the possible influences of 

 mind on the body. 



"From as far back as the fifteenth century, when the Alsatian pheas- 

 ants imagined they were changed to wolves, ran on all fours, howling 

 demonically and tearing children to pieces, and insisting that their limbs 

 be lopped off in order to convince others that the wolfish fur grew 

 inward from their skins, to the present day when those dreading hydro- 

 phobia bark and snarl like dogs, mew and spit like cats and are thrown 

 into convulsions at sight of water, the records of the disorder are replete 

 to overflowing with delusion, superstition, hysteria and unconscious simu- 

 lation. 



"The tragi-comical case of a number of persons dying in the sixteenth 

 century, after having eaten of a pig that had been bitten by a dog, which 

 in turn had been bitten by another and believed to be a rabid one, found 

 its counterpart a short time ago in Russia, where a medical editor and a 

 prominent follower of Pasteur suggested the treating of a number of per- 

 sons in the Pasteur Institute at Odessa for no better reason than that 

 they had partaken of milk from a cow bitten by a suspicious acting dog. 



