The therapeutics of hydrophobia / by Wm. Curran.

  • Curran, William, 1927-
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The therapeutics of hydrophobia / by Wm. Curran. 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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    THE THERAPEUTICS OF HYDROPHOBIA. o The enthusiastic reception that was lately accorded by the two great Academies of his country to M. Pasteur, as well as the publicity this subject has lately achieved amongst ourselves, must be my excuse for entering at this eleventh hour on any discussion, however brief, of the several methods that have been devised or practised in the past for the cure or relief of this malady. I have, moreover, nothing new to say on these points, only this, that I have seen a few cases of the kind myself, and that the literature of the question has ever had an interest and an attraction for me such as I can neither suppress nor ignore. These are they that now move me to take action in the matter of the therapy of this disease—a therapy that well illustrates the blind beliefs or rather dark gropings after truth of our fathers, as well as the more enlightened benevolence or sympathy of their sons, and the story of all these struggles and strivings, of all this faith or infatuation, or folly, culminating as it or they do in our great confrere's brilliant discovery, is one of the saddest, and at the same time one of the most glorious, episodes of our professional record. That this mysterious and inscrutable disorder should have monopolised to itself a larger share of popular pre- judice or public dread than its congeners, from all his- toric time, is not to be wondered at. Its latency and fatality, the suddenness with which it appeared on the scene, and the certainty with which it crowned its lethal mission with death were well calculated to baffle the wisdom of the wise and set at naught the arts of the learned. Nothing availed against it, and so we find accordingly substances or measures recommended as re- medies for it by men of “ light and leading ” in their day, which we now know were quite inert, if they were not positively injurious. Some, indeed, are so grotesque or disgusting as to preclude any detailed estimate of their merits in these pages. Others are so cumbersome or bulky as to excite our astonishment, and oblige us to ask ourselves how any sane man could advise or any sound