Rabies in Dogs and Other Animals Part 2

Of the real nature of the rabid virus, we know but little. It has never been analysed, and it would be a difficult process to analyse it. It is not diffused by the air, nor communicated by the breath, nor even by actual contact, if the skin is sound. It must be received into a wound. It must come in contact with some tissue or nervous fibre, and lie dormant there for a considerable, but uncertain period. The absorbents remove everything around; whatever else is useless, or would he injurious, is taken away, but this strange substance is unchanged. It does not enter into the circulation, for there it would undergo some modification and change, or would be rejected. It lies for a time absolutely dormant, and far longer than any other known poison; but, at length, the tissue on which it has lain begins to render it somewhat sensible, and assimilates to itself certain elements. The cicatrix begins to be painful, and inflammation spreads around. The absorbents are called into more powerful action; they begin to attack the virus itself, and a portion of it is taken up, and carried into the circulation, and acquires the property of assimilating other secretions to its own nature, or it is determined to one of the secretions only; it alters the character of that secretion, envenoms it, and gives it the power of propagating the disease.

Something like this is the history of many animal poisons. In variola and the vaccine disease the poison is determined to the skin, in glanders to the Schneiderian membrane, and in farcy to the superficial absorbents. Each in its turn becomes the depôt of the poison. So it is with the salivary glands of the rabid animal; in them it is formed, or to them it is determined, and from them, and them alone, it is communicated to other animals.

Professor Dick, in his valuable Manual of Veterinary Science, states some peculiar views, and those highly interesting, respecting the disease of rabies. He holds it to be essentially an inflammatory affection, attacking peculiarly the mucous membrane of the nose, and extending thence through the cribriform plate of the ethmoid bones to the interior part of the brain, and so giving rise to a derangement of the nervous system as a necessary consequence. This train of symptoms constitutes mainly, if not wholly, the essence of an occasional epidemic not unlike some forms of influenza or epizootic disease, and the bite of a rabid animal is not always, to an animal so bitten, the exciting cause of the disease, but merely an accidental concomitant in the prevailing disorder. Also the disease hydrophobia, produced in man, is not always the result of any poison introduced into his system, but merely the melancholy, and often fatal result of panic fear, and of the disordered slate of the imagination. Those who are acquainted with the effects of sympathy, and imitation, and panic, in the production of nervous disorders, will readily apprehend the meaning of the Professor.

Some of these diseases speedily run their course and exhaust themselves. Cowpox and farcy, in many instances, have this character. Perhaps, to a certain degree, this may be affirmed of all of them. I have seen cases, which I could not mistake, in which the symptoms of rabies were one after another developed. The dog was plainly and undeniably rabid, and I had given him up as lost; but, after a certain period, the symptoms began to be less distinct; they gradually disappeared, and the animal returned to perfect health. This may have formed one ground of belief in the power of certain medicines, and most assuredly it gives encouragement to perseverance in the use of remedial measures.

It has then been proved, and I hope demonstratively, that rabies is propagated by inoculation. It has also been established that although every animal labouring under this disease is capable of communicating it, yet, with very few exceptions, it can be traced to the bite of the dog. It has still further been shown that the malady, generally appears at some period between the third and seventh month from the time of inoculation. At the expiration of the eighth month, the animal may be considered to be safe; for there is only one acknowledged case on record, in which the disease appeared in the dog after the seventh month from the bite had passed.

Then it would appear that if a species of quarantine could be established, and every dog confined separately for eight months, the disease would be annihilated in our country, or could only reappear in consequence of the importation of some infected animal. Such a course of proceeding, however, could never be enforced either in the sporting world or among the peasantry. Other measures, however, might be resorted to in order to lessen the devastations of this malady; and that which first presents itself to the mind as a powerful cause of rabies is the number of useless and dangerous dogs that are kept in the country for the most nefarious and, in the neighbourhood of considerable towns, the most brutal purposes; without the slightest hesitation, I will affirm that rabies is propagated, nineteen times out of twenty, by the cur and the lurcher in the country, and the fighting-dog in towns.

Also read: Dog Health Info.