114 BISKASSS OF DOas. 



More accurately, however, the disease in man is known also &.i 

 rabies. 



Eveiy age and nation has produced its own crop of phylacteries, 

 and the supposed cure for rabies, in nearly e\ery instance, is 

 marked by ignorance and the grossest superstition. It would fill 

 pages to merely enumerate the absurdities man has resorted to 

 for the purpose of preventing and curing rabies. The practice of 

 docking the tails of dogs was originally instituted for the purpose j 

 while until quite recently (and the practice is not dead yet), it was 

 usual to " worm the tongue " — that is, to draw out the tendon under 

 the tongue which is used in moving it, and as it curled up on re- 

 moval Ignorance called it a worm ; then the heairt and tongue of a 

 dog were carried about the person ; and Abracadabra was written as 

 many times as there are letters in it, thus ! ABRACADABKA 

 ABRACADABR ABRACADAB and so on tiU the last line consists 

 of the letter A only, and this worn about the person. These and 

 many other equally absurd things have been considered prophy- 

 lactics. Among preventives of hydrophobia in persons actually 

 bitten by rabid dogs the following are a few of the hundreds in 

 vogue one time or another and believed in still ; a hair of the dog that 

 bit you ; the liver of the mad dog cooked and eaten ; the root of the 

 dog-rose ; the herb called dog's-tooth ; leaves of the dog beny tree ; 

 forcible immersion ia cold water till the party was nearly drowned ; 

 ashes of river crayfish which had been burnt alive. Of so-called 

 cures we have still ia this age of enlightenment the Onnskirk cure, 

 Princes nostrum, the Girling cure, Higgs' Hertfordshire cure, and 

 numberless others. The people who trade on the credulity of others 

 by selling such nostrums should be made to prove their own faith 

 and honesty by allowing themselves to be bitten by a mad dog and 

 trust to their own nostrum for safety. 



Among the popular fallacies concerning the disease the commonest 

 is that it is of spontaneous origin. Nothing is further from the truth; 

 rabies can no more be produced in a healthy dog without the germ of 

 the disease being communicated to him — which we may say is 

 practically only done by the bite of a mad one — than a farmer can 

 grow a field of turnips without sowing the seed. That a person 

 bitten by a healthy dog wUl become rabid or hydrophobic should 

 the dog become mad at some period of its life after having given the 

 bite, is as foolish as it would be to say that a person contracted fleas 

 from a dog that had no fleas on him, but might be infested with 

 them some years afterwards. There are people too who go so far 

 aa to say of muzzling dogs, which is the means of preventing the 

 spread of rabies adopted by our own and several other Governments, 

 that it is " an unnatural, pernicious, and inhuman practice ; a 



