Rabies and Hydrophobia. 267 



as three days and as long as i to 12 years (Chabert). In the 

 human being, however, there is always the danger of the disease 

 caused by simple dread (lyssophobia) and until these protracted 

 cases can be verified by successful inoculation on the lower 

 animals, they must be held as extremely doubtful. The Mont- 

 pellier cadet has been often quoted who left, a few days after he 

 had been bitten, spent ten years in Holland, then returrting to 

 the school and learning for the first time that his fellow cadet, 

 who had been bitten by the same dog, had gone mad, he too 

 became rabid without loss of time. Such cases have often been 

 cured by moral suasion and have been seized upon to corroborate 

 the heresy that there is no such thing as genuine rabies in man. 



Any incubation, in man or beast which has exceeded 40 days 

 should be considered as doubtful, until certified by the successful 

 inoculation of rabbits or other small animals. For casual inocu- 

 lations the incubation rarely varies much from the time embraced 

 between 16 and 30 days. It is abridged by a special receptivity ; 

 by an overdose of the poison ; by the inoculation of a virus of 

 unusual potency ; by the youth of the animal inoculated ; by 

 great heat of the weather ; by all forms of violent excitement ; 

 by rutting ; and by the inoculation of the virus on the head and 

 above all on the cerebral meninges. By this last method incuba- 

 tion may be reduced to 6 days. 



Symptoms in Dogs. In dogs as in other animals rabies is 

 manifested in two great types : the furious and the dumb or 

 paralytic, which, however, usually succeed each other in fully 

 developed cases. Yet the furious phenomena may be entirely 

 omitted, and again the victim may die in the early furious stage 

 so that the paralytic does not appear. The prominence of one 

 form over the other is to some extent determined by the germ 

 derived from a previous case of the same kind or by the family, 

 temperament and habits, bull dogs and hounds being specially 

 subject to the furious type, and house and pet dogs having rather 

 the paralytic form. 



The premonitory symptoms are in the main the same for both 

 types, and as these may enable us to recognize the disease before 

 the period of extreme danger, it is especially important that they 

 should be well understood. 



Some marked change in the disposition or habits of the animal 

 is the first obvious variation from health, and in a district or 



