The history and traditional treatment of rabies in Ethiopia.

HYDRoPHoBIA, though not excessively prevalent, was fairly common in Ethiopia in former days, and on at least one known occasion reached an epidemic proportion. Notwithstanding the inevitable superstitions and misconceptions, the disease, its method of contagion and incubation period were fairly well known, and traditional practitioners employed a wide variety of supposed cures, some of which are particularly characteristic of old-time Ethiopian medicine, and, in several cases being identifiable over a span of considerably over a century, illustrate the long-established character of the traditional pharmacopoeia.1 Early nineteenth-century travellers, the first to discuss the incidence of rabies, are by no means unanimous in their assessment, but tend to suggest that it was fairly widespread. Thus in the 1830s the German explorer Eduard Riippell, who reports seeing a mad dog at Adowa, goes on to declare that rabies was 'by no means uncommon'2 while the French traveller, Rochet d'Hericourt a decade or so later told of an apparently rabitic dog which bit three other dogs and a soldier at Debra Tabor.At about the same time the careful French investigator, Antoine d'Abbadie, noted that 'hydrophobia is not rare', and mentioned in passing that a rabitic dog had attacked two of his brother's servants, one of whom died, and quotes the case of another dog who bit four persons.4 The Frenchman's belief was that the disease was more widespread than in other Middle Eastern countries because Ethiopia's cool climate prevented people from sweating, and sweat, he argued, tended to disinfect the skin in case of bites by rabitic animals.5 Early in the second half of the century a French medical observer, Alfred Courbon, declared that rabies was 'very rare',6 while the British envoy, Walter Plowden, observed that the disease was 'not very common in Abyssinia', though he adds that it was 'more prevalent in Gojam than elsewhere'.7 A generation or so later, in the 1880s, the Italian geographer, Antonio Cecchi, likewise stated that hydrophobia was 'not serious in Abyssinia, at least in Shoa',8 while Nicholas Parisis, a Greek doctor in Tigre, agreed at about the same time that rabies was 'rare among the Abyssinians'.9 The French trader, Leon Chefneux, who off and on had spent some thirty years in the country, was similarly quoted early in the twentieth century as declaring that he had never seen anyone dying from the easily-recognizable symptoms of the disease,10 though Dr. Pellerin, the director of Addis Ababa's first veterinary institute, reported at about the same time on the case of a dog who displayed typical characteristics of hydrophobia.11 The first rabies epidemic of which we have record occurred in Addis Ababa in August 1903, and is reported by Lincoln De Castro, a physician at the Italian legation, who says that the outbreak lasted for 'a few months and then disappeared'. He adds that this was the only such occurrence during his ten-year residence in the Ethiopian