The Meta-Encyclopedia

Hydrophobia

2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Hydrophobia. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

rabies, from bite of mad dog, more rarely cat, wolf, or fox; a contagious disease, the result of a specific poison. The great danger lies in the fact that a person bitten by a supposed mad dog imagines or simulates its symptoms, especially if nervous or hysterical; whereas only a few of those bitten by a mad dog take the disease. The average period of incubation is 40 days, but it varies from 15 days to two years. Immediate cauterization or excision of the part is the only effective remedy. The Pasteur method of inoculation is as follows: A rabbit is inoculated with a fragment of the spinal cord of a mad dog. The animal is affected with hydrophobia in the space of about one fortnight. A portion of its spinal cord is employed to inoculate a second rabbit, which also contracts the disease, but more rapidly; the spinal cord of this second rabbit serves to inoculate a third, and so on. When the spinal cord of these animals, which have died of hydrophobia, is suspended in a perfectly dry tube its virulence diminishes by degrees and at last disappears. A collection of these spinal cords, some of them entirely stale and powerless, others more fresh and active, others, again, quite fresh and extremely active, are always kept in readiness. To render a dog insusceptible to rabies he is first inoculated with the stale and powerless specimens, then with fresher and more active ones, and lastly with the most powerful of all, when he becomes quite proof against the inoculation of rabies. Pasteur claimed that by the same process he could produce in the human being a corresponding immunity against hydrophobia. The difficulties that surround the subject will be appreciated when it is remembered that (1) 60 per cent. of people bitten by mad dogs do not develop hydrophobia; (2) the incubation of the disease is sometimes extremely long, cases having been known to be deferred till two years after the bite. HYDROPHYLLACEAE (hi-drō-filas'ē-i), a natural order of herbs and bushes containing about 80 known species, natives chiefly of the colder parts of America. None of them are of importance; but some of them are favorite ornaments of flower-borders, particularly different species of nemophila.

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

hi-dro-fo'be-a. See Rabies

What Has Changed in the Last Century

When Collier's wrote this in 1921 the disease still went by the symptom, hydrophobia, and the writer insisted that "immediate cauterization or excision of the part is the only effective remedy" alongside Pasteur's ladder of dried rabbit spinal cords. The name rabies won out, the agent was identified as a virus (Adelchi Negri described the telltale inclusion bodies in nerve cells in 1903), and burning or cutting out the wound has been abandoned in favour of long washing with soap and water. Post-exposure treatment today is a course of cell-culture vaccine given in the arm plus rabies immune globulin infiltrated around the bite; started promptly, it is very close to completely effective, and mass vaccination of dogs has eliminated the canine rabies variant from the United States and much of Europe. What has not changed is the grimmest fact: once symptoms appear rabies is still almost invariably fatal, and it kills roughly 59,000 people a year worldwide, nearly all of them from dog bites in Asia and Africa.

Written for this edition, 2026.