RABIES AND HYDROPHOBIA. 
677 
to this analogy the observation of thousands of instances of sup¬ 
posed transmission covering a period of more than two thousand 
years, and the case becomes so strong that it requires much 
more than a mere assertion to disprove it. 
We have, however, more evidence than this to prove that 
hydrophobia in man is not a mere mimetic disease. In the 
great debate on the subject of rabies which took place in the 
Paris Academy of Medicine in 1863, M. Tardieu, referring to 
the official statistics of France, said : “ We owe to them the 
ruin of a serious prejudice perpetuated by the obstinacy with 
which certain physicians have held to the non-existence of the 
rabies virus, offering themselves with a courage worthy of a 
better employment for an experiment in which they would be 
the first victims. Rabies, which for them is but a convulsive 
nervous affection originating most often from fear, the statistics 
show us developing at an age when the moral emotions are not 
yet born, when the imagination does not remain stricken with 
chimerical terrors—in early infancy. More than thirty cases 
of rabies have been noted with children under five years, some 
of them of two and three years.”* Since that time the com¬ 
munication of the disease to young children, some of them less 
than one year old, has frequently been recorded, but no one has 
explained how this could have occurred if the disease was sim¬ 
ply due to the imagination. 
The proof of rabies in mankind which appeals most strongly 
to the scientific man of to-day is the experimental demonstra¬ 
tion. The comparative pathologist has always accepted such a 
demonstration as incontestable with other diseases ; is there any 
reason why it should not be equally convincing with rabies ? 
When we have questioned the diagnosis of glanders, we have 
inoculated a well horse from the suspected one, and if glanders 
developed in the inoculated animal we have concluded that the 
horse from which the inoculation was made must have had 
glanders. A disease cannot be communicated by inoculation if 
the individual from which the inoculation is made does not 
* Tardieu. “Discussion sur la rage.” Bui. de l’Acad. de Med., 1S63, p. 1152. 
