HYDROPHOBIA IN BAJA CALIFORNIA. 249 



HYDROPHOBIA IN BAJA CALIFORNIA. 



BY DANE COOLIDGE. 



~TT7"HEN, in 1884, Pasteur discovered the true nature and cure 

 of hydrophobia, he dispelled the accumulated superstition of 

 centuries regarding this mysterious and dreaded disease. But in 

 some countries where hydrophobia exists his cure is not yet known, 

 and the old superstitions remain. While collecting mammals near 

 San Jose del Cabo, in the cape region of Lower California, two 

 summers ago, I found the country people very fearful of wild ani- 

 mals, especially of skunks and coyotes. My Mexican boy, whom I 

 had sent on an errand, remained perched half the afternoon in a 

 thorny mesquite tree because he had seen a coyote and was afraid it 

 was rabioso. But they fear the skunks most of all because of their 

 habit of approaching men in the night while they sleep, and biting 

 them on the toe or ear, or any exposed part. In defense, unusual 

 precautions are taken to exclude them. The windows of the houses 

 are barred with iron, and the doors are made in halves, horizontally, 

 so that the lower part may be closed to keep out animals and snakes 

 without interfering with free ventilation. The common people, who 

 live in brush houses, blockade their doorways at night, and rely on 

 their cur dogs to attack any animal which may come near. 



Notwithstanding all this evidence, and innumerable ghastly 

 stories, I remained a month in the country, at the rancho of Fran- 

 cis Pazik, a very intelligent and well-educated Bohemian, without 

 seeing any rabid animals. Then, one evening just at sundown, a 

 crowd of men came up the path, leading one of Pazik's mules and 

 dragging the carcass of a skunk. They said that it had come out into 

 the open field where the mule was picketed and bitten it on the 

 hind foot. All of them insisted that it was rabid, and cited its ex- 

 treme emaciation as a proof. The young man who dragged it showed 

 me his great toe, half burned off with blue vitriol, and told toe that a 

 skunk had bitten him there two months before, and the doctors had 

 burned it. These native " doctors " are uneducated men who live 

 on the superstition of the people. In the case of hydrophobia their 

 methods are characteristic. There are in the cane fields little insect- 

 eating animals called shrews which, in that country, give off a scent 

 so like that of a skunk that Pazik has hunted them out with his dogs 

 in the night by mistake. The " doctors " pay as much as two dollars 

 apiece for shrews on urgent occasions, and, mixing their bodies with 

 herbs and roots, form a concoction which they claim will ward off 

 hydrophobia. Besides this, they also bleed the patient and cauterize 

 the wound. 



