Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/193

Rh Among people more or less uncivilized, there prevail some curious notions with regard to hydrophobia. In the mountainous districts of Roumania, where the disease is common among wolves and dogs, the peasantry believe that birds of prey, as eagles, hawks, vultures, etc., fall dead from an aërial elevation never reached by other creatures, and are devoured by wolves; these latter thus contract rabies, transmit it to the shepherd-dogs, and they in turn communicate it to cattle and human beings simply by infecting the atmosphere with emanations from their diseased bodies. According to Burton (in his "Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca"), the tribes of El-Hejaz—a district of Arabia on the Red Sea—imagine that a bit of meat falls from the sky and renders mad any person eating it. They also recognize the fact of the communicability of hydrophobia from dogs. Burton says: "I was assured by respectable persons that, when a man is bitten, they shut him up, with food, in a solitary chamber for four days, and, if, at the end of that time, he still howls like a dog, they expel the ghul (devil) from him by pouring over him boiling water mixed with ashes—a certain cure, I can readily believe."

Sir Samuel Baker, while exploring the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia in 1862, found rabies quite prevalent in those regions. He relates how he was one night disturbed by a tremendous tumult, and light filling the air, and yelping of dogs. He went out and ran toward a blazing hut. "As I approached, first one, and then another dog ran screaming from the flames, until a regular pack of about twenty scorched animals appeared in quick succession, all half mad with fright and fire. I was informed that hydrophobia was very prevalent in the country, and that the certain preventive from that frightful malady was to make all the dogs of the village pass through the fire. Accordingly, an old hut had been filled with straw and fired, after which each dog was brought by its owner and thrown into the flames."

Fleming, while quartered with the British Army of Occupation at Tien-tsin, near Peking, China, in 1861, was assured on the best authority that, in some portions of the Flowery Land, it is the universal belief that a man affected with hydrophobia is enceinte, and that he is so distressed, and ultimately perishes, because he cannot be delivered!

Closely connected with outbreaks of lupine rabies, of which we have authentic accounts as early as the thirteenth century, was the remarkable superstition of the middle ages termed lycanthropia—a belief that human beings were temporarily transformed into wolves (or "were-wolves" as they were called), in order to satisfy an unnatural craving for human blood. It is well known that the wolf, when rabid, exhibits a peculiar change of habit and character. It quits its customary haunts in the forest recesses, and displays no fear or hesitancy in entering towns and villages, where it boldly encounters dogs, men, and other creatures, attacking them furiously, biting and tearing them, and then continuing its dreadful course of destruction. Brera