Hydrophobia in dogs and other animals : and the sanitary precautions against its transmission to the human race.

  • Russel, Charles P.
Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hydrophobia in dogs and other animals : and the sanitary precautions against its transmission to the human race. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    remarked that nothing was definitely established relative to the utility of the operation, but that the whitish vermiform substance thus removed was, it might be presumed, nothing else than the canal at- tached to the salivary apparatus, whose destruction might exercise some influence upon the secretion in diminishing the liquid transmit- ting the virus. The tradition never obtained much credence among the English. Dr. Johnson spoke of the reputed worm very express- ively as a substance—nobody knows what—extracted—nobody knows why. The whole theory was, however, substantially demol- ished in 1786, in the very country where it was most in vogue, by the communication of hydrophobia to both men and animals from dogs whose toll-wurms had been extirpated in the most approved man- ner. These facts were substantiated by the investigations of several sanitary commissions at Trieglitz in the province of Detmold, and the corps of operators was finally abolished. According to a report of Dr. Armand to the Paris Academy of Sciences, the same tradition and practice still continue in Thrace, and they are described by Auzias Turenne in the Receuil de Medecine for 1869 as being general in Turkey and Moldo-Wallachia. Dr. Xanthos says that in modern Greece they still remain as a memorial of the past. Fleming states that they prevail in Roumania,. and Ramon de Sagra observes that they are common in portions of Spain. A similar superstition exists even in our own country, especially in the South. The other presumed causes of spontaneous rabies would appear to be equally equivocal. Unsatisfied salacity,* putrid food, hunger,t thirst, anger, and extremes of temperature are manifestly circumstances which obtain among dogs quite generally throughout the world. In some regions, so far as can be learned, hydrophobia has always been either totally unknown or extremely rare, while in others exempt from * But few writers now maintain the theorj' that the disproportion between the sexes in the canine race and consequent difficulty of sexual gratification for many males produces hydrophobia. Statistics show that the num- ber of cases is about divided in proportion to the number of each sex, and that castrated dogs are as liable to the disease as others. Of two hundred and sixty-seven cases observed by Schrader in Hamburg, in 1852-3, there occurred two hundred and fifty-six in male dogs, ten in bitches, and one in a castrated animal. Of fifty- four pronounced cases observed by Tscherning in Denmark, from 1854 to 1857, there were found four male and three female dogs that had been castrated—thirteen per cent. Bourrel treated in eight years three hundred and forty-four rabid males and forty-nine rabid females. t Attempts to produce hydrophobia artificially by starving dogs have been ineffectually made by Radi and Bourgelat. The same negative results were obtained by Menecier who did not see a single instance of hydro- phobia among one hundred and sixty dogs thus treated. Pilwax observed during one of the severer epizootics in Vienna that the greater number of affected dogs belonged to owners in good circumstances, enjoying there- fore for the most part proper attention as to care and food.