For the Bite of a Mad Dog-
In modern rabies-free Britain we forget that the United Kingdom was once as prone to rabid animals as the rest of the world. Without over-stating the matter, rabies is one nasty virus: its rod-like bacteria invade the central nervous system through a bite from an infected mammal (dog, person it's all the same). A feeling of euphoria descends and the sufferer feels great, and certain they didn't get infected. There's a variable incubation period before the paranoia and insomnia begin.
Gradually, the anxiety will become delerium and the sufferer will begin to salivate, and their eyes will run, yet at the same time, they can't swallow properly. They become frightened of drinking water because their throat is closing up, resulting in the famous hydrophobia, which was usually put down of the cause of death, even though it is always respiratory failure due to paralysis. Rabies was known and feared in London throughout the Georgian period, with notable outbreaks in the 1750s, beginning in St James's in 1752 and reaching a peak in 1759, when rewards were offered for roaming dogs shot in the street, whether rabid or not. It prompted a cull of London's strays that equalled the plague culls of the previous century.
Londoners were quick to act, and well within their rights to shoot or otherwise kill a rabid dog. Those who owned them were very quickly informed and fined if they tarried in destroying their dog. London was a huge city full of tiny communities who, in general, knew their neighbours very well, or at least, lived in such close quarters they would have seen or heard the presence of a rabid animal. Pigs and horses also contracted rabies in Georgian London, which was a blow for those who depended on their annual pig for food, or their horse for a living. Hannah Glasse is famed for her Art of Cookery, published in 1747 (more of her Christmas recipes later in the week), but she also includes receipts for the treatment of those bitten by mad dogs:
A Certain Cure for the Bite of A Mad Dog
Let the patient be blooded at the arm, nine or ten ounces. Take of the herb..liver-wort, cleaned, dried and powdered, half an ounce. Of black pepper, powdered, two drams. Mix these well together, and divide the powder into four doses, one of which must be take every morning fasting, for four mornings successively, in half a pint of cow's milk warm. After these four doses are taken, the patient must go into the cold bath, or a cold spring or river every morning fasting for a month. He must be dipt all over, but not to stay in longer than half a minute, of the water be very cold. After this he must go in three times a week for a fortnight longer.
Hannah's next recipe for the bite of a mad dog includes the following dosages for livestock:
Eight or nine spoonfuls is sufficient for the strongest; a lesser quantity for those younger, or of a weaker constitution, as you may judge of their strength. Ten or twelve spoonfuls for a horse or a bullock; three, four or five to a sheep, hog or dog. This must be given within nine days after the bite; it seldom fails man or beast.
Before 1885 when Pasteur's work with infected rabbits produced a vaccine, rabies was deemed fatal in all cases. I am sure Hannah's well-meaning instructions were no use to man, or beast, but to dismiss Georgian Londoners as ignorant would be wrong; Hannah's receipts concentrated on preventing hydrophobia through exposure (psychological, rather than physiological but still based upon observation), and her treatments are very strict about the nine day limit. Over a century later, Pasteur discovered the Post Exposure Prophylaxis window (in which treatment was effective) was no more than ten days, so Hannah was definitely onto something.
