HYDROPHOBIA 201 



within a few days of the appearance of the symptoms of disease in the 

 dog, and when the saliva was already virulent. However this may be, 

 it is perfectly certain that a dog can not convey this disease when he 

 does not have it or before he has himself contracted it. If, therefore, a 

 dog does not show symptoms of rabies within a week from the time the 

 bite is inflicted there is no danger of the person contracting the disease. 

 The only possibility of an exception to this rule is the very doubtful one, 

 that in extremely rare instances a dog may have rabies and recover from 

 it without showing characteristic symptoms. A very few cases of this 

 kind have been observed among dogs artificially inoculated, but it has 

 not yet been shown that their saliva became virulent, or that similar cases 

 occur under natural conditions. The fact remains, however, that a person 

 is in no danger of contracting rabies because a healthy dog has bitten him, 

 which dog is afterward inoculated with rabies." 



The following — that I found in some paper, is too good to leave out 

 of this book: 



"It is a pleasure to note that Superintendent Frael of the New York 

 Department of Health comes out flat-footed regarding the extreme rarity 

 of rabies, asserting that what people suffer from is false or pseudo rabies 

 brought about by scare. He draws attention to the fact that during the 

 life of the New York Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which 

 was started in 1894, no less than three millions of dogs and cats have been 

 handled. That the employes engaged in the work of collecting the strays 

 number about thirty, and on an average everyone of them is bitten four 

 times every month, or fifty times a year, and that some of the dogs' were 

 subsequently declared by the local authorities to be rabid. On this basis 

 of computation there has been thirty thousand bites by all sorts of ani- 

 mals and one hundred and fifty different men have been employed during 

 the twenty years, yet not a single case of hydrophobia has resulted, all that 

 the men did being to cleanse the wound thoroughly and have it dresseu. 



Of course, we clog people, those of us who have had the greatest ex- 

 perience Avith dogs, have always held similar views, and your correspon- 

 dent's very simple remedy has for years been to turn the water faucet on 

 the wound, so as to thoroughly cleanse it, and while this is being done, 

 get someone to take bicarbonate of soda, always to be found in every house- 

 hold, or if not, then common baking powder, and make a creamy paste, 

 which spread on a clean piece of linen and put that on the wound and then, 

 bind it. After a while the emulsion will dry, but pour a little water on 

 the binding, so as to soak to the dressing, and that will do. You will 

 have no feeling of anything wrong and there is little question that it is 

 this feeling of something wrong that causes this pseudo-hydrophobia. 



Dog men cannot be too emphatic in telling people not to be afraid 

 of a dog bite, and if the United States would only pass a law to hang, 

 draw and quarter every managing editor of a paper that published a mad 

 dog story, every doctor who told a patient or suggested to a patient the 

 possibility of hydrophobia and towed the Pasteur institutes out to the 

 middle of the Atlantic and sunk them with all hands, that would end 

 rabies and the hydrophobia scare." 



And now read this: ' 



"The late Dr. Michel Peter, the greatest clinical expert of France, 

 said: 'Pasteur does not prevent hydrophobia; he gives it.' This opinion 

 was indorsed by such scientific leaders as Dr. T. M. Dalon, F. R. C. S., Sir 

 Benjamin Ward Richardson, Dr. Charles Bell-Taylor, Surgeon-General 

 Charles Gordon, of England, and Professor VonFrisch, of Vienna. The 

 celebrated Dr. A. Lutaud, editor-in-chief of the 'Jouranl de Medecine de 

 Paris,' said in that journal on September 16, 1899, referring to the savants 

 at the Pasteur Institute: 'They have not diminished the mortality; they 

 have augmented it, in creating the 'madness of laboratories,' very often 

 fatal, with which they have inoculated a great number of individuals.' " 



