May, 1820, I attended on a bitch at Pimlico. She had snapped at the owner, bitten the man-servant and several dogs, was eagerly watching imaginary objects, and had the peculiar rabid howl. I offered her water. She started back with a strange expression of horror, and fell into violent convulsions that lasted about a minute. This was repeated a little while afterwards, and with the same result. She was destroyed.
The horrible spasms of the human being at the sight of, or the attempt to swallow, fluids occur sufficiently often to prove the identity of the disease in the biped and the quadruped; but not in one in fifty cases is there, in the dog, the slightest reluctance to liquids, or difficulty in swallowing them.
almost every case in which the dog utters any sound during the disease, there is a manifest change of voice. In the dog labouring under ferocious madness, it is perfectly characteristic. There is no other sound that it resembles. The animal is generally standing, or occasionally sitting, when the singular sound is heard. The muzzle is always elevated. The commencement is that of a perfect bark, ending abruptly and very singularly, in a howl, a fifth, sixth, or eighth higher than at the commencement. Dogs are often enough heard howling, but in this case it is the perfect bark, and the perfect howl rapidly succeeding to the bark.
Every sound uttered by the rabid dog is more or less changed. The huntsman, who knows the voice of every dog in his pack, occasionally hears a strange challenge. He immediately finds out that dog, and puts him, as quickly as possible, under confinement. Two or three days may pass over, and there is not another suspicious circumstance about the animal; still he keeps him under quarantine, for long experience has taught him to listen to that warning. At length the disease is manifest in its most fearful form.
There is another partial change of voice, to which the ear of the practitioner will, by degrees, become habituated, and which will indicate a change in the state of the animal quite as dangerous as the dismal howl; I mean when there is a hoarse inward bark, with a slight but characteristic elevation of the tone. In other cases, after two or three distinct barks, will come the peculiar one mingled with the howl. Both of them will terminate fatally, and in both of them the rabid howl cannot possibly be mistaken.
There is a singular brightness in the eye of the rabid dog, but it does not last more than two or three days. It then becomes dull and wasted; a cloudiness steals over the conjunctiva, which changes to a yellow tinge, and then to a dark green, indicative of ulceration deeply seated within the eye. In eight and forty hours from the first clouding of the eye, it becomes one disorganised mass.
There is in the rabid dog a strange embarrassment of general sensibility — a seemingly total loss of feeling.
Absence of pain in the bitten part is an almost invariable accompaniment of rabies. I have known a dog set to work, and gnaw and tear the flesh completely away from his legs and feet. At other times the penis is perfectly demolished from the very base. Ellis in his
Shepherd's Sure Guide