210 KENNEL DISEASES. 
attention to itself cannot occasion any surprise, considering the tragic features 
of the final struggle, the long uncertainty as to the outbreak, and the invariable 
failure of medicine to effect a cure. Moreover, the impartial investigator must 
believe it to be a real danger, slight though it may be. 
Of the reputed cases of hydrophobia in man, it may be said that nearly all, 
if not all, are the products of imagination, which simulates the characteristics 
ascribed by popular superstition to the disease called rabies; and the deaths in 
the most of such are attributable to lock-law, or to fear, epilepsy, acute mania, or 
hysteria and nervous collapse. 
Indeed, the picture of hydrophobia is so stamped upon the minds of all, that 
the mere thought of it, after being bitten by a dog, throws imaginative people 
into such panics of nervous excitement that they unconsciously reproduce its 
supposed symptoms, and die without having experienced a touch of any real dis- 
ease. And notwithstanding the efforts that have been made to dispel this 
delusion, and thus ease the public mind, a gain is scarcely perceptible; and he 
must be near right who has said that hydrophobia “can best be cured in the 
patient’s grandfather,—that is, by educating the people now that there is no 
such disease, or at least that it is as rare as hen’s teeth, and by so doing our 
grandchildren will not know of nor suffer from it.” 
It has been aptly said that the serious and ofttimes fatal influence of terror 
and expectant attention, fostered by popular alarm, is attested by other epidem- 
ics of imitative nervous disorder, and is a familiar fact to those who have care- 
fully studied the influence of the mind on the body. From the fifteenth century, 
when Alsatian peasants imagined that they were changed to wolves, ran on all 
fours, howling and tearing children to pieces, insisting that their limbs be lopped 
off in order to convince others that the wolfish fur grew inward from their skins, 
down to the present day, when those dreading hydrophobia bark like dogs, mew 
like cats, and are thrown into convulsions at the sight of water, the records of 
hydrophobia are replete to overflowing with delusion, superstition, hysteria, and 
unconscious simulation. 
Rare as hydrophobia certainly is in the human family, as already said in sub- 
stance, there is sound reason for the belief that rabies is scarcely more common 
in the canine race, At all events it is safe to assert that not one dog out of a 
thousand supposed to be rabid or mad is really so. Indeed, in some countries 
where dogs are notoriously numerous not a single case of the disease has ever 
been heard of. 
Dogs frequently have attacks which so closely resemble rabies that even an 
expert would find it difficult to distinguish between them. For example, in hot 
weather they sometimes suffer intensely from the heat, and are then extremely 
liable to become delirious, run wildly about, and finally go into convulsions. 
Such an attack occurring while a dog was away from home and on a public 
street, there would be every chance of his being killed as rabid; whereas were a 
