This very sensible treatise concluded by recommending cauterization, now long forgotten, instead of the various quack remedies which had so long been in vogue, and the use of butter of antimony.
Le Roux did not allude in his paper to certain tenacious and cruel prejudices, which had caused several hydrophobic persons, or persons merely suspected of hydroprobia, to be killed like wild beasts, shot, poisoned, strangled, or suffocated.
It was supposed in some places that hydrophobia could be transmitted through the mere contact of the saliva or even by the breath of the victims; people who had been bitten were in terror of what might be done to them. A girl, bitten by a mad dog and taken to the Hôtel Dieu Hospital on May 8, 1780, begged that she might not be suffocated!
Those dreadful occurrences must have been only too frequent, for, in 1810, a philosopher asked the Government to enact a Bill in the following terms: “It is forbidden, under pain of death, to strangle, suffocate, bleed to death, or in any other way murder individuals suffering from rabies, hydrophobia, or any disease causing fits, convulsions, furious and dangerous madness; all necessary precautions against them being taken by families or public authorities.”
In 1819, newspapers related the death of an unfortunate hydrophobe, smothered between two mattresses; it was said à propos of this murder that “it is the doctor’s duty to repeat that this disease cannot be transmitted from man to man, and that there is therefore no danger in nursing hydrophobia patients.” Though old and fantastic remedies were still in vogue in remote country places, cauterization was the most frequently employed; if the wounds were somewhat deep, it was recommended to use long, sharp and pointed needles, and to push them well in, even if the wound was on the face.
One of Pasteur’s childish recollections (it happened in October, 1831) was the impression of terror produced throughout the Jura by the advent of a rabid wolf who went biting men and beasts on his way. Pasteur had seen an Arboisian of the name of Nicole being cauterized with a red-hot iron at the smithy near his father’s house. The persons who had been bitten on the hands and head succumbed to hydrophobia, some of them amidst horrible sufferings; there were eight victims in the immediate neighbourhood. Nicole was saved. For years the whole region remained in dread of that mad wolf.
The long period of incubation encouraged people to hope that some preventive means might be found, instead of the painful operation of cauterization; some doctors attempted inoculating another poison, a viper’s venom for instance, to neutralize the rabic virus—needless to say with fatal results. In 1852 a reward was promised by the Government to the finder of a remedy against hydrophobia; all the old quackeries came to light again, even Galen’s remedy of cray-fish eyes!
Bouchardat, who had to report to the Academy on these remedies, considered them of no value whatever; his conclusion was that cauterization was the only prophylactic treatment of hydrophobia.
Such was also Bouley’s opinion, eighteen years later, when he wrote that the object to keep in view was the quickest possible destruction of the tissues touched by rabietic saliva. Failing an iron heated to a light red heat, or the sprinkling of gunpowder over the wound and setting a match to it, he recommended caustics, such as nitric acid, sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, potassa fusa, butter of antimony, corrosive sublimate, and nitrate of silver.
Thus, after centuries had passed, and numberless remedies had been tried, no progress had been made, and nothing better had been found than cauterization, as indicated by Celsus in the first century.