266 The Management and Diseases of the Dog. 
to be mad, can only be averted by the death of the animal. 
This is an egregious mistake. A dog must be infected 
with rabies before it can produce ‘‘ Hydrophobia.” Again 
if a dog after biting a person is at once destroyed before 
being examined by a qualified canine veterinary surgeon, 
the mind of the wounded individual may be ina state of 
continual disquietude, from the oft-recurring thought that 
the dog may have been mad, and this painful and haunting 
uncertainty acting upon a highly nervous temperament is 
not unfrequently productive of a fatal issue from Hysteria 
and nervous exhaustion, so often wrongly reported as 
“ Hydrophobia.” My advice has always been to let a dog 
which has been guilty of biting, be fully secured until 
the maximum period of incubation has passed—then if he 
is in perfect health, or free from rabid symptoms, the 
mind of the injured person will be relieved, and the 
animal, if still desired, can then be destroyed—not with 
the policeman’s truncheon, but with chloroform. Ina few 
instances when I have appeared in court to plead this 
arrangement, and even volunteered to take personal 
charge of the dog, I have met with opposition, and 
unnecessary terror and anxiety to the bitten individual 
has been the consequence, but a sensible magistrate will 
always see the wisdom and humanity of granting such an 
application, and even advocating it to the injured person. 
There is no such disorder as “epileptic rabies,’ which 
was alieged, during the recent London scare, to exist. Such 
an allegation is not only misleading, but purely imaginary 
on the part of the originator. Canine rabies is a specific 
disease and has no concomitant malady. 
EPILEPSY. 
Dogs of all breeds are very liable to fits, and the epileptic 
is the form most frequently met with. To say that epilepsy 
has been confounded over and over again with rabies, would 
be stating what is correct. A mistake, unfortunately, for 
