the.com/hydrophobia

means An old name for rabies, named for its cruelest symptom — the throat spasms so violently at the sight or thought of water that the infected avoid drinking even though they're dying of thirst.

from From Greek hydro- 'water' plus phobos 'fear, panic flight' (the god Phobos personified terror itself). Physicians in antiquity, including Celsus, used the term to describe rabid patients who recoiled at water — not out of a phobia in the modern psychological sense, but because the virus attacks the nerves controlling swallowing, making the throat seize up painfully. The word later drifted into general use for an ordinary fear of water, a softer, less lethal borrowing of a genuinely medical horror.