OR CANINE MADNESS. 201 



such be the case, no legal enactments of whatever severity, short 

 of the extinction of the whole race, could secure us. There are 

 others also (and by much the most numerous, and, without any 

 offence to the former, by much the most experienced) who main- 

 tain that the disease is never now of spontaneous origin'*, My 

 own opinion, formed on an acquaintance with it of thirty years, 

 in a great many of which the rabid cases amounted to several 



or what condition ? The rabies which Professor Rossi produced by keeping 

 cats shut up in a room was symptomatic, and not the specific and communica- 

 ble disease. Majendie, Dupuytren, and Breschet, subjected dogs to the utmost 

 state of filthy and close confinement for a long time ; and though they became 

 very generally diseased, not one became rabid. If putrid animal sordes could 

 originate rabies, how often must it break out among the dogs of the lower class 

 of dog- dealers and fanciers in London, where hundreds of birds, rabbits, 

 guinea-pigs, &c., with every variety of dog, are confined in one small close room 

 or cellar ? neither is it probable but cases of close confinement must have been 

 frequent in those countries which it has never yet visited. Dr. Gilman like- 

 wise erroneously embraces a similar opinion, apparently on the authority of a 

 single case, the correctness of which there is great reason to doubt. Mr. Cole- 

 man also advocates spontaneous origin from the same causes with Dr. Hamil- 

 ton : and such an opinion, from such a source, I am both surprised at and 

 sorry for. Mr. Dewhurst, a very respectable medical practitioner, likewise 

 ranges himself on this side, and details a most dubious case, which he considers 

 in proof of it, in No. 32 of The Feteritiarian, but which is most ably answered 

 by Mr. Youatt in No. 33 of that work, where he demonstrates that the morbid 

 appearances after death were clearly not those of rabies, and the symptoms, 

 while living, Mr. Dewhurst was unable to give. As a spontaneous and symp- 

 tomatic hydrophobia takes place in the human occasionally^ from the excite- 

 ments of phrenitis, hysteria, gastritis, &c. ; is it not probable also that a sympto- 

 matic irritation, which may by a partial observer be mistaken for rabies, iriay 

 arise in dogs also from various causes ? Indeed, we are warranted in'concluding 

 from observation, that such cases do occasionally occur, and, so occurring, 

 cause much error and confusion in our conclusions ; because the observers'fail 

 to bring such cases to test by post mortem- examination and by the inoculation 

 of others from the salivary secretion of the suspected animal : wherever it has 

 been done, it has always failed. 



* Mr. Meynell was so convinced of the invariable origin of the disease from 

 inoculation, that he always made every new hound perform quarantine before 

 he entered the pack. 



