280 
ANIMAL PATHOLOGY. 
strangely increased in the rabid dog, he is, as I have described 
him in a former lecture, ** no sooner parted from his paramour, 
than he attacks her with the utmost fury, and literally tears her 
to pieces.” This fact, then, of the dogs not biting the bitches, 
nor the bitches the dogs, would be almost proof positive to me 
that some febrile or cerebral affection was here mistaken for 
rabies, and I have shewn, in a former lecture, how easily this 
may happen*. 
Heat has been supposed to be an exciting cause of rabies. 
Dr. Heineken says that curs of the most wretched description 
abound in the island of Maderia—that they are afflicted with 
almost every disease —that they are tormented by flies, and heat, 
and thirst, and famine, and yet no rabid dog was ever seen there*!'. 
With the exception of Jamaica, into which the disease was im¬ 
ported from the continent of America, in the year 1783J, it 
has not yet found its way into the West Indian islands, or the 
Indian Archipelago, or Syria§, or Egypt||, or the south of Africa, 
or any part of the continent of South America. It has gained 
some footing in Spain; but it has penetrated a little way only 
into Portugal, and has never yet been seen in the streets of 
Lisbon. In Constantinople it is unknown, although in that 
city and in Lisbon there are, according to the advocates of spon¬ 
taneous rabies, other active causes, connected with filth and the 
want of water. 
These are extraordinary and undoubted facts. Dr. Heineken 
seems to draw from them the natural inference. ‘When the favour¬ 
able circumstances under which the canine race is here placed 
for generating the disease are considered, we may conclude that 
hydrophobia cannot be produced de novo%. 
The annual report of my humble school for 1834, places in a 
very strong point of view the independence of rabies on that 
principle which has been supposed to have so much power over 
it, namely, temperature. There were as many cases of rabies in 
* Some fearful tragedies have taken place connected with this symptom 
and stage of the disease. A young man having received a bite from a dog, 
to which no attention was paid, and being married six months afterwards, 
was, on the wedding night, seized with rabies, and murdered his bride by 
literally tearing out her entrails with his nails and teeth. 
A fact of similar horror happened not many years since in Scotland. A 
man tore his wife to pieces in the same way, and was himself found dead in 
the morning, having beaten out his brains against the walls .—Agricultural 
Magazinei July 1800. 
t Med. Rep. July, 1824, p. 14. 
See Mosely on Hydrophobia, and the valuable work by Abhande. 
§ London and Med. Journal, 1/84. 
f| Larrey, Relation du Expedition, § 9. 
^ Medical Repository, July, 1824. 
