Review article
Josip Lalić – Treating rabies, per aspera ad astra and back
Petar Džaja
; Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
*
Magdalena Palić
; Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Ivan Zemljak
Jakov Ćorić
Krešimir Severin
; Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Anđelko Gašpar
Ivan Križek
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
Josip Lalić was born in 1796* in Slunj, and died in around 1860 in Ogulin. He made his region famous throughout this part of Europe by treating rabies in people who had been bitten by animals with rabies. During his life, he was a teacher in Crikvenica, then a teacher, notary and judge in Slunj. As a child, in 1908 he was bitten by a rabid dog in Bosnia, and it was there that he learned from an elderly woman how to treat people who had been bitten by an animal with rabies, and people suffering from rabies. In several places it is recorded that a wounded soldier revealed a cure for rabies to the Nemčić family, which is still confirmed today by their ancestors. It is recorded without doubt that Lalić was treated in Bosnia for rabies as a child, and that he brought that form of treatment from Bosnia, but a question remains which, like our predecessors who wrote about this, we will not be able to answer, and that is where Lalić found some of his insights into the aetiology of rabies and the means for its treatment, and whether he concealed the actual cure. Lalić believed that rabies occurs in dogs due to unsatisfied sexual desire, and not because of a lack of water and heat, as recorded long ago in 1823 in old classic books, and defended in 1863 in the Academie de Medicine. Lalić’s opinion on the aetiology of rabies in dogs is not original, but it raises the question of where and how he reached this insight. Lalić could have learned about cutting the sublingual vein at that time because this was often performed for headaches. It was not possible to treat rabies using plants such as Gentiana cruciata and Buphtalnium salicifolium, which is why a reasonable doubt exists that Lalić actually concealed the real cure, and many people believe that it was canarypox, which he does not mention anywhere in any of his writings. It therefore follows that the treatment of people who had been bitten by rabid animals by the Nemčić family
and Lalić was not original.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
332468
URI
Publication date:
20.6.2025.
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