IN AN EARLY^ STAGE OF HYDROPHOBIA. 533 
amputation or deep excision of the bitten part, may encourage 
some hope—we can scarcely yet dare to calculate how much or 
how little—and he will assuredly deserve well of his profession. 
Thus far as to the propriety of the operation in an undoubted 
case of rabies. But how does it bear on this case? Why, in 
a state of great excitation from some nervous lesion, the de¬ 
struction of the injured portion of the nerve will be often found 
to be in the highest degree beneficial. It was so here. The 
patient began to recover as soon as the parts were freely cut 
away. But there teas no rabies in the case. The dog was not 
rabid, and could not communicate a disease which he had not 
himself. 
The usual duration of rabies in the dog; is from four to six 
days: it rarely, indeed, reaches the seventh day, and it is often 
fatal on the third. This dog became sickly about the middle of 
June. It bites its mistress on the 22d—a week afterwards. It 
remains at large two or three days after that, and at the expiration 
of the second week it was killed: ^'the throat and salivary 
glands having become enlarged, the flow of saliva much increased, 
and the eyes slightly inflamed.” 
The salivary glands of the mouth are generally somewhat en¬ 
larged, and especially in the early stage of rabies: this enlargement, 
in a few cases and in a very slight degree, spreads to the parotid 
glands, so that they may be felt, but rarely seen to be enlarged. 
The flow of saliva is profuse at some time in the early or middle 
stage of the disease, but it lasts not long, rarely twenty-four 
hours, and is succeeded by a strange dryness of the mouth and 
fauces, and a thirst which nothing can quench : and, before the 
6th or 7th day, to say nothing of the 14th, the inflammation of 
the eyes, if pure inflammation ever did exist, has passed away, 
and there remains only the green-bottle opacity, characteristic 
of this disease. The dog probably had distemper, in some stages 
of which these patients are little less irritable than under the in¬ 
fluence of rabies: and the woman, as these gentlemen acknow¬ 
ledge, w'as in a high state of nervous excitation, and nothing 
more. 
/ 
No offence can possibly be meant to these gentlemen; but 
is there no veterinary surgeon in tlie neighbourhood of Kel- 
