Of the causes or treatment of this disorder we know nothing

Of the causes or treatment of this disorder we know nothing

Of the causes or treatment of this disorder we know nothing

Of the causes or treatment of this disorder we know nothing; neither are we likely to learn, when the nature of the disease is considered. The danger of the study must excuse our ignorance; nor is this much to be regretted, since it is highly improbable that medicine could cure what is so deeply seated and universally present. The entire glandular structure seems to be in the highest degree inflamed; and besides these, the brain, the organs of mastication, deglutition, digestion, nutrition, generation, and occasionally of respiration, are acutely involved. The entire animal is inflamed. Some except from this category the muscular system; but such persons forget that paralysis of the hind extremities is often present during rabies. The body seems to be yielded up to the fury of the disease, and it obviously would be folly trying to cure a malady which has so many and such various organs for its prey. Neither are we better informed with regard to the causes which generate the disease. Hot weather has been imagined to influence its development; but this belief is denied, by the fact that mad dogs are quite as, if not more, frequent in winter than in summer. Abstinence from fluids has been thought to provoke it; but this circumstance will hardly account for its absence in the arid East, and its presence in a country so well watered as England, especially when the unscrupulous nature of the dog's appetite is considered. The French have been supposed to set this latter question at rest by a cruelty, miscalled an experiment. They obtained forty dogs, and withheld all drink from the unhappy beasts till they died. Not one of them, however, exhibited rabies, and by this the French philosophers think that they have demonstrated that the disorder is not caused by want of water. No such thing; they have proved only their want of feeling, and show nothing more than that one out of every forty dogs is not liable to be attacked with rabies. They have demonstrated that the utmost malice of the human being can be vented upon his poor dumb slave without exciting rabies. They have made plain that the poor dog can endure the most hellish torments the mind of man can invent without displaying rabies. They have held themselves up to the world, and in their book have duly reported themselves as capable of perverting science to the most hideous abuses, and under its name contemplating acts and beholding sufferings at which the feelings of humanity recoil with disgust.