The Symptoms of Rabies

The early symptoms of rabies in the dog are occasionally very obscure. In the greater number of cases, these are sullenness, fidgetiness, and continual shifting of posture. Where I have had opportunity, I have generally found these circumstances in regular succession. For several consecutive hours perhaps he retreats to his basket or his bed. He shows no disposition to bite, and he answers the call upon him laggardly. He is curled up and his face is buried between his paws and his breast. At length he begins to be fidgety. He searches out new resting-places; but he very soon changes them for others. He takes again to his own bed; but he is continually shifting his posture. He begins to gaze strangely about him as he lies on his bed. His countenance is clouded and suspicious. He comes to one and another of the family and he fixes on them a steadfast gaze as if he would read their very thoughts. "I feel strangely ill," he seems to say: "have you anything to do with it? or you? or you?" Has not a dog mind enough for this? If we have observed a rabid dog at the commencement of the disease, we have seen this to the very life.

There is a species of dog — the small French poodle — the essence of whose character and constitution is fidgetiness or perpetual motion.

If this dog has been bitten, and rabies is about to establish itself, he is the most irritative restless being that can be conceived of; starting convulsively at the slightest sound; disposing of his bed in every direction, seeking out one retreat after another in order to rest his wearied frame, but quiet only for a moment in any one, and the motion of his limbs frequently stimulating chorea and even epilepsy.

A peculiar delirium is an early symptom, and one that will never deceive. A young man had been bitten by one of his dogs; I was requested to meet a medical gentleman on the subject: I was a little behind my time; as I entered the room I found the dog eagerly devouring a pan of sopped bread. "There is no madness here," said the gentleman. He had scarcely spoken, when in a moment the dog quitted the sop, and, with a furious bark sprung against the wall as if he would seize some imaginary object that he fancied was there. "Did you see that?" was my reply. "What do you think of it?" "I see nothing in it," was his retort: "the dog heard some noise on the other side of the wall." At my serious urging, however, he consented to excise the part. I procured a poor worthless cur, and got him bitten by this dog, and carried the disease from this dog to the third victim: they all became rabid one after the other, and there my experiment ended. The serious matter under consideration, perhaps, justified me in going so far as I did.

This kind of delirium is of frequent occurrence in the human patient. The account given by Dr. Bardsley of one of his patients is very appropriate to on profit purpose:

"I observed that he frequently fixed his eyes with horror and affright on some ideal object, and then, with a sudden and violent emotion, buried his head beneath the bed-clothes. The next time I saw him repeat this action, I was induced to inquire into the cause of his terror. He asked whether I had not heard howlings and scratchings. On being answered in the negative, he suddenly threw himself on his knees, extending his arms in a defensive posture, and forcibly threw back his head and body. The muscles of the face were agitated by various spasmodic contractions; his eye-balls glazed, and seemed ready to start from their sockets; and, at the moment, when crying out in an agonizing tone, 'Do you not see that black dog?' his countenance and attitude exhibited the most dreadful picture of complicated horror, distress, and rage that words can describe or imagination paint."

I have again and again seen the rabid dog start up after a momentary quietude, with unmingled ferocity depicted on his countenance, and plunge with a savage howl to the end of his chain. At other times he would stop and watch the nails in the partition of the stable in which he was confined, and fancying them to move he would dart at them, and occasionally sadly bruise and injure himself from being no longer able to measure the distance of the object. In one of his sudden fits of violence a rabid dog strangled the Cardinal Crescence, the Legate of the Pope, at the Council of Trent in 1532.

Related: Dog Health.