2. He may have been diseased, but not to such a degree as to have rendered his saliva infectious.
3. The saliva, when infectious, may have been so washed off in passing through the patient's clothes, as not to have entered the wound made in the flesh. And
4. There may have been no predisposition in the patient to receive the fever. This is often observed in persons exposed to the plague, yellow fever, small-pox, and to the infection of the itch, and the venereal disease.
The hydrophobia, like the small-pox, generally comes on with some pain, and inflammation in the part in which the infection was infused into the body, but to this remark, as in the small-pox, there are some exceptions. As soon as the disease discovers itself, whether by pain or inflammation in the wounded part, or by any of the symptoms formerly mentioned, the first remedy indicated is blood-letting. All the facts which have been mentioned, relative to its cause, symptoms, and the appearances of the body after death, concur to enforce the use of the lancet in this disease. Its affinity to the plague and yellow fever in its force, is an additional argument in favour of that remedy. To be effectual, it should be used in the most liberal manner. The loss of 100 to 200 ounces of blood will probably be necessary in most cases to effect a cure. The pulse should govern the use of the lancet as in other states of fever, taking care not to be imposed upon by the absence of frequency in it, in the supposed absence of fever, and of tension in affections of the stomach, bowels, and brain. This practice, in the extent I have recommended it, is justified not only by the theory of the disease, but by its having been used with success in the following cases.
Dr. Nugent cured a woman by two copious bleedings, and afterwards by the use of sweating and cordial medicines.
Mr. Wrightson was encouraged by Dr. Nugent's success to use the same remedies with the same happy issue in a boy of 15 years of age[81].
Mr. Falconer cured a young woman of the name of Hannah Moore, by “a copious bleeding,” and another depleting remedy to be mentioned hereafter[82]
Mr. Poupart cured a woman by bleeding until she fainted, and Mr. Berger gives an account of a number of persons being bitten by a rabid animal, all of whom died, except two who were saved by bleeding[83].
In the 40th volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of London, there is an account of a man being cured of hydrophobia by Dr. Hartley, by the loss of 120 ounces of blood.
Dr. Tilton cured this disease in a woman in the Delaware state by very copious bleeding. The remedy was suggested to the doctor by an account taken from a London magazine of a dreadful hydrophobia being cured by an accidental and profuse hæmorrhage from the temporal artery[84].