252 RABIES CANINA 



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early characteristics of madness ; and these appearances are 

 certainly not unusual in hounds and kennelled dogs, but they 

 are less frequently observed in the smaller kinds, or in such 

 as 'live witTiin doors, and are more immediately about our 

 persons *. Costiveness is not uncommon in the incipient 

 stag-e ; in the latter it is still more frequent. An early sick- 

 ness and vomiting often appear, but although ineffectual 

 retchings may continue, actual vomiting does not often ac- 

 company the complaint through its progress; the peculiarity 

 of the inflammation in the stomach rather tends to retain the 

 ingesta within it. Indeed, this circumstance forms one of the 

 strongest criteria of the existence of the disease, as will be 

 hereafter noticed. 



It is not unusual for one of the first symptoms to be that of 

 continually licking, or violently scratching, some particular 

 part of the body. A close examination of such part will fre- 

 quently detect a scar, or the remains of the wound by which 



* I have great reason to think that mvich of the discrepancy we meet 

 with in the various accounts that appear relative to rabies, arises from the 

 confined field of observation from whence they are drawn. One gives 

 a detail of rabies as it has ajjpeared in one or two individual cases that 

 accidentally fell under his notice ; another describes it as it is found to 

 xist among hounds, pointers, or other large dogs only ; and a third draws 

 a portrait of it as it shewed itself among the smaller and confined dogs 

 in close domestication; and yet each (not considering that original cha- 

 racter and habit stamp a still further variety on a disease already suf- 

 ficiently variable) expects all future cases exactly to coincide with his 

 own statement, or that they should fully bear him out in his own views 

 of the subject. In the larger breeds of dogs, and particularly in ken- 

 nelled ones, as hounds, &c., where close domestication has not wholly 

 reclaimed their native ferocity, rabies may, and indeed does, shew itself 

 with much of that wildness and mischievous character that has gained 

 it the name oi madness. The rabies of the wolf and fox, although close 

 congeners of the dog, and that likewise of the half-reclaimed cat, is 

 always stamped with a ferocity and malignance of character that is 

 foreign to what visually occurs in the smaller and more domesticated 

 breeds, in which cultivation has wrought such an entire change of their 

 nature, that even their symptomatic appearances xmder disease are, in 

 a great degree, altered by it. 



