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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    to many of the inhabitants of Arequipa and Ica, carrying off forty-two persons in the latter town alone. In one instance twelve fell victims out of fourteen bitten by a single dog. The largest number of deaths occurred in from twelve to ninety days after the bite. The affection would, therefore, appear to have been of a more virulent character than usual. It is likewise related that a number of slaves upon a sugar plantation contracted the disease by feeding upon the beef of rabid cattle, a statement which we can hardly accept as true.* About this same period hydrophobia was noticed to be remark- ably prevalent in many portions of the United States, where the medical literature of the time abounded with accounts of cases and discussions as to the character and treatment of the disease. In 1810 Southern Russia was scourged by the affection. In Prussia, between iSioand 1819, its human victims amounted to 1,635, a large number of whom owed their deaths to the attacks of rabid wolves. In 1813 the disease was very common in the Ukraine. In 1815 it prevailed in Austria, and at the same time, according to Viborg, it raged in Copenhagen. In Podolia, in 1818, Marochetti, a celebrated Russian physician, attended no fewer than 26 cases of hydrophobia in the human subject, and shortly afterward announced to the medical world his so-called discovery of Lyssi, which created a great sensation. According to his description the hydrophobic virus, after the bite of a rabid animal, is transported to and deposited in the orifices of the secretory ducts of the sublingual glands, beside the frenum linguae and upon the lateral parts of the inferior surface of the tongue, where form a number of vesicles or pustules of variable size, in which by means of a probe fluctuation can be detected. It cannot be determined precisely when these pustules appear—ordinarily be- tween the third and ninth days after the bite—sometimes the twentieth day, or even later. If the poison in these pustules be not destroyed by cauterization during the first twenty-four hours of their appearance, it will be removed from them by resorption, producing metastasis to the brain and nervous system, with resulting hydrophobia. Thus, according to Marochetti, the virus does not remain in the wound where it was originally deposited, but is quickly conveyed in all its integrity to the sublingual glands. According to this physician * Gohier alone mentions similar instances. He states that he has seen hydrophobia in dogs result from eating the flesh of a rabid dog in one instance, and of a rabid sheep in another. But a large number of experi- ments by Hertwig would seem to prove the innocuousness of such food.