34 
HYDROPHOBIA AND HOMCEOPATHY. 
bit a maid-servant in the arm, who offered to caress him, and 
presently afterwards he bit the daughter of the farmer. They 
were in great alarm about it, drove him from the house, and he 
took refuge in a kennel, in which they shut him up. Two or 
three days afterwards he became so ferocious that they destroyed 
him. On examining the arms of the two females, that of the 
servant shewed a little bruise, but no rupture of the skin : there 
was a slight scratch on the arm of the daughter. She, however, 
would have nothing done to it, and the matter would have been 
forgotten, but, twenty days after the bite the ox refused to eat 
and to drink, and became furious as soon as water was offered 
to him. He remained in this furious state two days, when 
M. L was sent for. He was still furious, and his fury 
was exasperated whenever water was presented to him. Eight 
drops of the tincture of belladonna, No, 12, were given, and two 
hours afterwards the lowings had ceased, but foam ran from the 
mouth, and there was a rapid champing of the jaws. Water 
was offered to him ; he looked on it without fear, and drank 
a little. Some hay was offered to him, of which he took a 
mouthful, which he had not done since he had been brought 
into the stable. On the morrow he was better. Four drops of 
the tincture of belladonna. No. 30, were administered, and every 
unfavourable symptom disappeared, except that he did not eat or 
drink with the appetite that he did before. He however grew 
rapidly thin, and died suddenly, eight days afterwards. 
M. Laville de la Plaigne of course attributes much efficacy 
to the belladonna ; he says that it destroyed the symptoms of 
hydrophobia, but it could not prevent the poison from ulti- 
mately destroying the animal. But how, if there was no rabies 
at all — if it was merely an attack of phrensy — a sudden en- 
gorgement of the vessels of the cerebral membranes, and which 
subsided, in the form of a partial fit, but not, perhaps, without 
leaving some effusion, or having effected some .serious lesion, 
under the influence of which the animal rapidly wasted away 
and died ? There is no one at all accustomed to cattle who is 
not perfectly aware of the debility, local or general, which 
follows an attack of sough or phrensy. Either the vessels do 
not soon, or at all, regain their former tone, and a second attack 
often carries him off ; or, from disarrangement of the circulatory 
system generally, he gradually or rapidly fades away. 
A fourth case belongs to the practitioner of human medicine, 
rather than to the veterinary surgeon. Eight or ten days after 
Yhe death of the ox, the daughter of the farmer began to feel on 
getting up weakness of the lower extremities, shiverings all over, 
and vertigo. This went off in the course of the day ; but at 
