Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 2: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
Science
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 2: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
3. Dogs, when they are said to be mad, exhibit the usual symptoms of
fever, such as a want of appetite, great heat, a dull, fierce, red, or
watery eye, indisposition to motion, sleepiness, delirium, and madness.
The symptom of madness is far from being universal, and hence many dogs
are diseased and die with this malignant fever, that are inoffensive,
and instead of biting, continue to fawn upon their masters. Nor is the
disposition of the fever to communicate itself by infection universal
among dogs any more than the same fever in the human species, and this I
suppose to be one reason why many people are bitten by what are called
mad dogs, who never suffer any inconvenience from it.
4. A dissection of a dog, by Dr. Cooper, that died with this fever,
exhibited all the usual marks of inflammation and effusion which take
place in common malignant fevers. I shall in another place mention a
fifth argument in favour of the disease in dogs being a malignant fever,
from the efficacy of one of the most powerful remedies in that state of
fever, having cured it in two instances.
II. The disease produced in the human species by the bite of a rabid
animal, is a _malignant_ fever. This appears first from its symptoms.
These, as recorded by Aurelian, Mead, Fothergill, Plummer, Arnold,
Baumgarten, and Morgagni, are chills, great heat, thirst, nausea, a
burning sensation in the stomach, vomiting, costiveness; a small,
quick, tense, irregular, intermitting, natural, or slow pulse; a cool
skin, great sensibility to cold air, partial cold and clammy sweats on
the hands, or sweats accompanied with a warm skin diffused all over
the body, difficulty of breathing, sighing, restlessness, hiccup,
giddiness, head-ach, delirium, coma, false vision, dilatation of the
pupils, dulness of sight, blindness, glandular swellings, heat of urine,
priapism, palpitation of the heart, and convulsions. I know that there
are cases of hydrophobia upon record, in which there is said to be a
total absence of fever. The same thing has been said of the plague.
In both cases the supposed absence of fever is the effect of stimulus
acting upon the blood-vessels with so much force as to suspend morbid
action in them. By abstracting a part of this stimulus, a fever is
excited, which soon discovers itself in the pulse and on the skin, and
frequently in pains in every part of the body. The dread of water,
and the great sensibility of the system to cold air, are said to give
a specific character to the hydrophobia; but the former symptom, it
has been often seen, occurs in diseases from other causes, and the
latter has been frequently observed in the yellow fever. It is no more
extraordinary that a fever excited by the bite of a rabid animal should
excite a dread of water, than that fevers from other causes should
produce aversion from certain aliments, from light, and from sounds
of all kinds; nor is it any more a departure from the known laws of
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