Rabid

by Monica Murphy

  As the symptoms intensify, a frothy foam dribbles from the lips, the victim’s breath becomes fetid and her thirst, burning. Often these symptoms are accompanied by an intense fear of water…, gnashing teeth, the desire to bite, and death is not slow in putting an end to these horrible afflictions.

  It seemed that rabies hysteria was reaching its historical apex—ironically, at the very same time as medicine stood on the cusp of a rabies cure.

  Out on the vast American plains, rabies stalked the nineteenth-century frontiersmen in a form unimaginable in Europe, though no less diabolical. Indeed, Canadian trappers came to bestow on the offending creature the dramatic nickname l’enfant du diable, or “the child of the devil,” a fitting name given its foul odor and sinister black coat. Americans called it something more prosaic: the “’phoby cat,” that first word being short for “hydrophobia.” The malefactor in question was the skunk.

  It was widely believed among Plains travelers that skunk bites universally led to rabies infections. No less an American than Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “there is no wild beast in the West, no matter what its size and ferocity, so dreaded by old plainsmen as this seemingly harmless little beast.” In the 1870s, when the army colonel and memoirist Richard Irving Dodge was commanding one frontier fort, all sixteen cases of reported skunk bite led to fatality; at another fort, the surgeon put the death rate at ten cases out of eleven. The lesson of those startling numbers, obviously, is not that all skunks were carrying the disease but rather that skunks do not attack (or even approach) humans except when in the demented throes of rabies.

  Roosevelt, in one of his memoirs, recalled a hunting trip when a skunk encounter went comically awry. A hungry ’phoby cat burrowed under the wall of their log hut in search of food. Despite the close quarters, one of the hunting party—Sandy, a “huge, happy-go-lucky Scotchman”—shot at the creature with his revolver, waking his huntmates with a terrible jolt and causing general consternation among them; the shot didn’t injure any hunters, luckily, though it didn’t hurt the skunk, either. Half an hour later, the skunk returned, and, recalled the future president, “the sequel proved that neither the skunk nor Sandy had learned any wisdom by the encounter”: Sandy shot again, at which his sleeping companions jumped up and fled the hut in their confusion. (This time, however, Sandy hit the skunk. “A did na ken ’t wad cause such a tragadee,” TR reports the Scotchman having said, morosely.)

  L’enfant du diable was not the only New World animal to harbor rabies. Less common, though arguably more fearsome, was the rabid wolf. Perhaps the most spectacular attack on the Great Plains occurred in 1833, along the Green River in what is now western Wyoming. That summer, multiple teams of fur traders, led by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, had an appointment to meet for one of their semi-regular “rendezvous.” In mid-July, the encampments of these traders were terrorized by what one nineteenth-century chronicler called “one of those incidents of wilderness life which make the blood creep with horror.” A raving wolf tore along the river, through the camps of sleeping traders, biting them and their cattle. In one camp, he was said to have bitten twelve men. In another, an eyewitness reported that three men were bitten in their tents, all in the face. It’s unknown how many men died from their wounds; some of the accounts, like that of the Indian who “shortly afterwards” began to “roll frantically on the earth, gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth,” or the trader who threw himself from his horse and began “barking like a wolf,” sound suspiciously exaggerated. But most accounts confirm that men and livestock came down with the disease.

  Another rabies-addled wolf rampaged through Kansas’s Fort Larned in 1868. In one of his memoirs, Colonel Dodge passes along a full account of the incident, as put down in the fort’s own records: “On the 5th August, at 10 p.m.,” the account ran,

  a rabid wolf, of the large grey species, came into the post and charged round most furiously. He entered the hospital and attacked Corporal, who was lying sick in bed, biting him severely in the left hand and right arm. The left little finger was nearly taken off. The wolf next dashed into a party of ladies and gentlemen sitting in Colonel’s porch, and bit Lieut. severely in both legs.

  Leaving there, he soon after attacked and bit Private in two places. This all occurred in an incredibly short space of time; and, although those abovementioned were the only parties bitten, the animal left the marks of his presence in every quarter of the garrison. He moved with great rapidity, snapping at everything within his reach, tearing tents, window-curtains, bedclothing, &c, in every direction. The sentinel at the guard-house fired over the animal’s back, while he ran between the man’s legs. Finally he charged upon a sentinel at the haystack and was killed by a well directed and most fortunate shot.

  Frederick Benteen, who would later become famous (and, to some, infamous) for his disobedience of Custer’s orders at Little Big Horn, was stationed at Larned at the time of the attack, and he recalls that all the bitten soldiers, save one, died of hydrophobia. That one, a soldier named Thompson, “was saved on account of wolf biting through pants, drawers and socks, thus getting rid of all the virus on clothes,” Benteen wrote to a correspondent in 1896. “It scared Thompson ‘pissless,’ as we say in the cavalry, and well it might!”

  Rabies cures on the frontier were a mishmash of medicine and folk remedy. The benefits of cauterization and bleeding, those brute-force but nevertheless somewhat effective tools of the ancients, were generally known, though quack treatments like nitrate of silver were also sometimes applied. One novel cure, recommended by one Western commentator, was the use of progressively greater quantities of the deadly poison strychnine.

  But there was also a particular fascination with Native American cures. The anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, recounting his time with the Blackfeet, describes a cure for rabies whereby the sufferer was essentially sweated out of his illness. His relatives bound his hands and feet, rolled him in a buffalo hide, and built a fire not just around him but on top of him as well. The natives explained that “so much water [came] out of his body that none was left in it, and with the water the disease went out, too.” Colonel Dodge put forward the truly odd claim that skunk bites, so fatal to the white settlers, did not affect Native Americans one bit, whereas for wolf bites the situation was reversed: “In every instance, death by hydrophobia is to the Indian the sure result of even the slightest scratch from the teeth of the rabid animal.” (Dodge adds: “They make no attempt at treatment, but philosophically commence preparations for the death sure to come in a few days.”) Of one particularly tantalizing Native American cure for rabies, the existence is recorded but the specifics lost to history. In 1827, the War Department went so far as to solicit federal agents in Indian country to ascertain what cure the Native tribes had for hydrophobia. Thomas McKenney, of the Office of Indian Affairs, received a detailed reply from the field, describing a medicinal plant that the natives claimed would cure rabies. It’s unclear whether the government tested its efficacy, but the Department of War was clearly serious in hoping that white farmers would learn to cultivate the crop as a cure: when McKenney passed along the correspondence to the American Farmer magazine, he also sent the magazine a packet of seed, “with the view to have it distributed, in your discretion, for the preservation and multiplication of the plant.”

  Interest in these Native cures seemed to flow from the presupposition that these so-called Indians themselves lived in a sort of animal state: settlers felt as if the wolfish disease should be best understood by those who were closer in nature to the wolf. This identification of Native Americans with wolves dated from the earliest Pilgrims, who had arrived with their own superstitious beliefs in the wolf as an evil, almost supernatural predator. As Jon T. Coleman, a historian at Notre Dame, points out in his book on wolves in early American culture, Vicious: “From the colonists’ perspective, Indians sang, talked, prayed, fought, and traveled like wolves.” In 1642, the Massachusetts governor, John Winthrop, described the newl
y settled land as overrun with “wild beasts and beast-like men.” Later, an eighteenth-century clergyman in Northampton, Massachusetts, in decrying the guerrilla warfare of the natives, noted that they “act like wolves and are to be dealt withal as wolves.” It should be noted that many of the natives associated strongly with the wolf themselves. One tribe, the Skidi Pawnee, dressed in cloaks of wolf skin and were known as the Wolf People by other tribes in the region; individuals in many tribes took names that claimed some kinship with the wolf.

  Regardless, as wolf and native both were beaten back over centuries of brutal eradication, the frontier attitude toward both seemed to soften—from outright hatred and fear to a sort of colonial condescension. More typical, over time, was the attitude toward wolves struck by Francis Parkman in his 1849 book about the Oregon Trail: “There was not the slightest danger from them, for they are the greatest cowards on the prairie.”

  In the waning days of the nineteenth century, the key weapons that would be required to slay rabies were actually being forged in the study of a different disease—the study, in fact, of the one other illness generally known at that time to pass from animals to humans. Anthrax was an ideal target for the early adherents of germ theory, because it was a spore-forming bacterium, rather than a virus, and as such it is abnormally large for a pathogen. Moreover, unlike many of its microbial brethren, it is found in copious numbers in the blood of late-stage patients.

  Isolation of the anthrax bacillus was accomplished by the great German physician Robert Koch, who was not even thirty, and just a country doctor, when he took a position as a local medical official in the town of Wollstein and began carrying out his pioneering research. Through the pinching of pfennigs (in particular, by forgoing the purchase of a carriage, which he would have needed to perform house calls), Koch was soon able to acquire a microscope; he chose one made by Edmund Hartnack of Potsdam, in Germany’s east, arguably the finest microscope maker of the day. Koch began his studies of anthrax in 1873, and by Christmas 1875 he had not only definitely discovered the microbe responsible but also tracked its entire life cycle in a rabbit. More important still, he had learned to culture the microbe artificially, by using the aqueous humor of the rabbit’s eye as a sterile medium. The resultant paper—“The Etiology of Anthrax, Based on the Life History of Bacillus anthracis,” published in 1876, when Koch was only thirty-two—helped both to establish the field of microbiology and to establish its author as one of that field’s foremost practitioners.

  Microbiology’s other titan was twenty years older and worked three hundred miles to the west, in Paris. While Robert Koch’s intellectual pleasure lay in pure discovery, Louis Pasteur was obsessed with practical applications. After creating a procedure for removing harmful microbes from milk and beer (which we still know today as pasteurization), he had turned his energies to inoculation. By 1876, he had already developed a vaccine for a disease in poultry, and after reading Koch’s paper, he turned his attention to anthrax. In his successful creation of an anthrax vaccine, he honed the method—attenuation, or the weakening of live pathogens—that he would soon apply to the even more insoluble-seeming problem of rabies. Four thousand years had elapsed since the Laws of Eshnunna warded against the rabid dog; but over the course of just five years, from 1880 to 1885, both our ignorance and our terror of rabies would be entirely upended by the work carried out in one laboratory on the rue d’Ulm.

  * * *

  * Later, after a long feud with William Shippen, the army’s top medical man, Rush would sour on Washington’s leadership of the army; when he expressed these sentiments to Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, Rush’s name became linked with the so-called Conway Cabal, which aimed to replace Washington with another general, Horatio Gates. Rush’s reputation as a patriot has unfairly suffered as a result.

  † The preface does, it should be noted, read suspiciously like boilerplate. “I cannot consent to the publication of your ingenious dissertation,” it begins, “without requesting you to allow me room enough in your preface, to express the great pleasure I derived from reading it. It will be resorted to hereafter as a repository of facts and opinions upon the disease of which it treats.”

  * As it was, Emily would live to only the age of thirty, dying in December 1848 of what was probably tuberculosis. Her younger sister, Anne, died six months later of the same condition. Charlotte, the oldest, died at thirty-eight. But as Ann Dinsdale, librarian at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, has remarked, “The surprise is not that the Brontës died so young but that they lived so long.” A health report in 1850 found the life expectancy in Haworth to be just twenty-five. All six Brontë siblings lived through a bout of scarlet fever as children, a statistically unlikely occurrence; two-fifths of Haworth children perished before their sixth birthdays.

  * “We have little desire to disturb the dream of a benevolent man,” commented the Gazzetta Medica di Milano on the publication of his proposal. “We cannot, however, help stating that, while reading over his plan, a slight difficulty occurred to us. Suppose the establishment [is] in operation and flourishing. All dogs have been killed by their masters, all canine importation has been prohibited, and, lastly, all the new-born in the seraglio have been pitilessly castrated. So far [so] well! But what dogs remain to frequent such establishments? Where are new recruits to be found?”

  Louis Pasteur oversees administration of the rabies vaccine. Cover of L’Illustration magazine, 1885.

  5

  KING LOUIS

  He was born in 1822 to a father who was a provincial tanner of animal hides—a bitterly nostalgic veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who would pin his Legion of Honor ribbon to his spotless frock coat for his regular solitary Sunday stroll through town and field—and to an imaginative, enthusiastic mother from a large family of warmhearted gardeners. Their snug little home above the tannery in Arbois was thick with the fetid smell of wool grease. Still, Louis Pasteur’s rustic boyhood was a happy one. He enjoyed fishing, sledding, and the company of his three sisters. An eager but undistinguished student, he was noticed primarily for his artistic abilities. While some of the locally distinguished acquaintances who sat for portraits with the young Pasteur supposed he might someday have a modestly bright future in painting, his father’s ambition was that Louis would eventually achieve the respectable station of secondary-school instructor.

  Pasteur was not quite nine years old when his quiet village childhood was punctuated by a disturbing drama. After hearing reports of a rabid wolf marauding through the region of Arbois, furiously biting man and beast, Pasteur and his friends witnessed one victim being brought to the blacksmith’s shop for treatment. The sight of a red-hot iron cauterizing the man’s still-frothy wounds made a lasting impression on the young Pasteur. So did the hydrophobic deaths soon afterward of eight of his fellow Arboisians, who had suffered the wolf’s bites on their hands and heads.

  As a university student in Paris, Pasteur was exposed to the great scientific minds of his day, and his own gift for original research finally surfaced. Following completion of his master’s degree at the École Normale Supérieure, Pasteur chose not to return to the provinces as a schoolteacher and instead took a position in the laboratory of the famous chemist Jérôme Balard. He defended theses in physics as well as chemistry and after one year’s time made his first report to the French Académie des Sciences on the relationship between various crystalline forms of particular chemical substances and the rotational polarization of light—a paper that elegantly unified much of the contemporary research into molecular physics and chemistry.

  Pasteur was appointed a professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he underwent two important transformations. First, almost immediately upon meeting Marie Laurent, the gentle, patient daughter of the university provost, Louis Pasteur began a campaign to win her hand that would soon seal his fate as a dutiful family man. Second, while he continued to make discoveries in the laboratory concerning the physical and chemica
l character of crystalline substances, Pasteur increasingly concerned himself with scientific problems that had direct practical applications, such as the process for industrial production of racemic acid crystals and, later—as the dean of the faculty of science at Lille—the fermentation of beetroot alcohol. Pasteur saw himself as performing science for the people: the French people in particular. Before long he would likewise be known as the people’s scientist.

  In 1857, Pasteur returned to the École Normale in Paris. Here his ongoing discoveries in the fermentation and spoilage of wine, which he established to be microbiological processes, led to studies that exploded the stubborn myth of spontaneous generation and notably led to the development of new preservation methods for perishables. Pasteurization was born and would change forever the handling of food and drink. Pasteur immediately and doggedly began to explore the relationship between the putrefaction of foodstuffs and the necrosis of diseased tissues. As his research interests evolved from physics and chemistry to microbiology and medicine, the general populace became increasingly interested in his work. Indeed, the emperor and empress themselves began to pay keen attention, and Pasteur, for his part, quickly learned how to transform public interest in his research into material support for the glassware, incubators, laboratory bench space, animals, and capable assistants his ongoing endeavors would require.