La peste dans l'empire Ottomon 1700–1850

Theodorides' survey of more recent rabies literature from 1800 onwards is also extensive. It includes a History of rabies published in 1810 and written not by a physician but by a hospital administrator who happened to be the father of Honore de Balzac. Balzac pere did well to distinguish between rabies and hydrophobia which could be caused by psychological factors unrelated to the disease proper; and he appealed for tighter controls on stray dogs. He also made a moving plea that such cases of "non-infectious psychological hydrophobia" made it of paramount importance to avoid hasty decisions to use euthanasia as was then sometimes done-usually by the pillow-smothering method. Rational experimental work began early in the nineteenth century, developing from slow beginnings in Germany and in France, where Magendie performed transmission experiments in the Paris dog-pound. The great achievement of that century was, of course, the development of Pasteur's post-exposure vaccine; here Theodorides is rightly at pains to emphasize the contributions of Pierre-Victor Galtier who, in the late 1 870s, began a study of rabies in rabbits. The rabbit develops a "dumb" paralytic, non-furious (non-biting) type of rabies and therefore provides a convenient subject for experimentation. Galtier, who believed the seat of the disease to be exclusively in the lingual glands and the saliva, made an extensive study which he reported to the Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Science. His reports provided a convenient point of departure for Pasteur's more immediately and more obviously successful work on rabies. The book proceeds via the work of Pasteur and his team on rabies vaccine to later studies of Negri's inclusion bodies and related theories to the final revelations, in the 1 960s, of the nature, dimensions, and properties of rabies virus as we now know it. As a final icing on the cake, we also get Dr Theodorides' extensive guide to literary sources on rabies-from Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid via Rabelais and Montaigne to Joyce, Noel Coward, and even Patrick White-and many more. In its entirety, the present volume is a formidable compilation of all that is worth knowing of rabies. It must be welcomed as an invaluable and definitive work of reference. The Ottoman Empire was literally "the sick man" of Europe. One of the conclusions of this rich and detailed monograph is that the population of the empire was stagnant in the eighteenth and the first half of the …