522 DOGS USED FOR SPORT. 



" The biting, inarticulate howling, and barking sounds, are not 

 made more frequently by a hydrophobic patient than by another 

 madman in the maniacal stage of chronic cerebral disease.* The 

 patient often warns his attendants between the fits, which seldom 

 last longer than a quarter or half an hour, and begs pardon for his 

 misbehavior towards them, and sets his worldly affairs in order, in 

 perfect consciousness of the near approach of his end. The 

 paroxysms of madness and convulsions, having steadily grown more 

 frequent for two or three days, now begin to diminish in violence 

 as the patient loses strength. Rarely, it happens that death occurs 

 at the height of the malady, during a severe and long continued 

 choking fit. The exhaustion and collapse usually augment from 

 hour to hour ; the voice grows hoarse and feeble, the respiration 

 shallow, the pulse small, irregular, and very frequent, and death 

 ensues with the signs of a general paralysis, which is sometimes 

 preceded by a deceptive amelioration of the symptoms. 



" It might be supposed that the attacks of madness occurring 

 in lyssa were simply a result of the despair that would affect even 

 a person not having this disease, if he suffered from retching at 

 short intervals for a day or two. I once attended a patient suffer- 

 ing from severe pharyngitis, who, when I asked him to try and 

 drink, hurled the glass from him, and acted like a madman. 



" We find something like this too, in patients with croup or 

 oedema glottidis. The fact, also, that sometimes patients of very 

 emperate and resigned natures do not become maniacal would 

 also favor this view. But there are some objections to it, es- 

 pecially the fact that, even in persons the most resigned, the 

 absence of mania is one of the rarest exceptions, as well as the 

 excessive height that the madness usually reaches in lyssa patients. 

 It is certainly more probable that the madness in lyssa is not due 

 to moral grounds, but is caused by a propagation of the exces- 

 si\ ely increased morbid excitability of the motor-central apparatus 

 of the pharyngeal and respiratory nerves to the central organs 

 of the psychical functions. The symptoms of the mania have 



• Romberg says, that a great inclination to bite, along with the absence of char- 

 acteristic reflex spasms, in one of the diagnostic points between true lyssa and 

 those hypochondriacal and maniacal conditions that the fear of the disease Dot un- 

 frequently develops in persons that have been bitten. This state might be termed 

 'yssaphobia. 



