Rabid

by Monica Murphy

  17 one of humanity’s first recorded jokes: The joke (as well as its interpretation) comes to us from Andrew R. George, “Ninurta-pāqidāt’s Dog Bite, and Notes on Other Comic Tales,” Iraq 55 (1993): 63–75.

  19 “If a dog becomes rabid”: Wu Yuhong, “Rabies and Rabid Dogs in Sumerian and Akkadian Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 121, no. 1 (Jan.–March 2001): 33.

  19 “Like a rabid dog, he does not know”: Ibid.

  19 the omens of entrails readers: Ibid., 35.

  19 lunar eclipses in particular months: Ibid., 36.

  19 the Marduk Prophecy: Ibid., 37–38.

  19 some of the incantations: Ibid., 38–42.

  21 The Samhita devotes nearly a thousand words: Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bhishagratna, trans., An English Translation of the Sushruta Samhita (Calcutta: published by the author, 1907), 733–36.

  21 “The bodily Vāyu, in conjunction”: Ibid., 733–34.

  23 his notes on hydrophobia: Celsus, De medicina, book 5, chap. 27.

  23 an anonymous methodist text: Ivan Garofalo, ed., De Morbis Acutis et Chroniis (New York: E. J. Brill, 1997), 85–89.

  23 the notes on hydrophobia made by Soranus: On Acute Diseases and On Chronic Diseases, trans. I. E. Drabkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 361–89.

  24 “The victims of hydrophobia die quickly”: Ibid., 367.

  24 Based on findings of teeth and bones: Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 111.

  25 dating back as far as 3500 B.C.: Katharine Rogers, First Friend: A History of Dogs and Humans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 29.

  25 when archaeologists excavated her temple at Isin: Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 70.

  25 often scarred with knife marks: Nicholas Wade, “In Taming Dogs, Humans May Have Sought a Meal,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 2009.

  26 “come to the world of men in the shape”: Willem Bollée, Gone to the Dogs in Ancient India (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), 54.

  26 rife with images of dogs as battlefield scavengers: Ibid., 33–34.

  26 An excavated tomb at Abydos: Michael Rice, Swifter Than the Arrow: The Golden Hunting Hounds of Ancient Egypt (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 36–37, 46, 55.

  27 References to dogs as scavengers in Egypt: D. M. Dixon, “A Note on Some Scavengers of Ancient Egypt,” World Archaeology 21, no. 2 (Oct. 1989): 193–97.

  27 “They were afraid that some lyssa”: Xenophon, Anabasis, book 5, chap. 7.

  28 “My dogs in front of my doorway”: The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 22.66–76.

  29 Iris slinging it at Athena: R. H. A. Merlen, De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity (London: J. A. Allen, 1971), 27.

  29 renders both transitions with awful acuity: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), book 3, 252–318.

  30 As described by Hesiod, Cerberus was quite friendly: Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 770–74.

  30 “slaver from Cerberus”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 4, 683.

  30 along with a creation myth: Ibid., book 7, 578–95.

  30 symptoms of aconite poisoning: John Blaisdell, “A Frightful, but Not Necessarily Fatal, Madness: Rabies in Eighteenth-Century England and English North America” (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 1995), 18.

  31 In 2001, two researchers at France’s Institut Pasteur: Hassan Badrane and Noël Tordo, “Host Switching in Lyssavirus History from the Chiroptera to the Carnivora Orders,” Journal of Virology 75, no. 17 (2001): 8096–104.

  32 a team led by the Stanford epidemiologist: Nathan Wolfe, “The Origin of Malaria: Discovered,” Huffington Post, Aug. 3, 2009.

  32 particularly intriguing details about smallpox: Yu Li et al., “On the Origin of Smallpox: Correlating Variola Phylogenics with Historical Smallpox Records,” PNAS 104, no. 40 (2007): 15787–92.

  32 archaeological evidence shows the clear presence: Donald Hopkins, The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 14–15.

  34 the disease does appear in Ge Hong’s: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), VI:6:91–92.

  34 Things totter off the rails with Pliny: Pliny the Elder, Natural History, book 29, chap. 32.

  Chapter 2: The Middle Rages

  40 as the historian John Cummins notes: John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 74.

  40 stag pursued by hounds would sometimes figure: Brigitte Resl, ed., A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age (New York: Berg, 2007), 76.

  40 one Christian allegorist likened the ten points: Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 68.

  40 Bestiaries, in their treatment of the stag: Resl, Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, 61.

  40 One fourteenth-century German work: Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 72.

  41 ordered not to eat the flesh of wild beasts: Exodus 22:31.

  42 “his hidden parts were made rotten and stinking”: Matthew Zimmern, “Hagiography and the Cult of Saints in the Diocese of Liège, c. 700–980” (Ph.D. diss., University of St. Andrews, 2007), 48.

  43 Hubert’s own set of otherworldly interventions: Ibid., 51.

  43 petitioned the current bishop, Waltcaud: Satoshi Tada, “The Creation of a Religious Centre: Christianisation in the Diocese of Liège in the Carolingian Period,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54, no. 2 (April 2003): 218–19.

  46 “The chien baut must not give up”: Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 19.

  46 The Castilian king Alfonso XI: Ibid., 25.

  46 One medieval archbishop of Canterbury: George Jesse, Researches into the History of the British Dog (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866), 2:36.

  47 Thomas à Becket: Ibid., 2:38.

  47 “A grehounde sholde be heeded lyke”: Ibid., 2:136–37.

  47 William of Wykeham upbraided one particular abbey: Eileen Power, Medieval People (London: Methuen, 1950), 121.

  48 list of English public records: Jesse, History of the British Dog, 2:7.

  48 In other accounts, peasants who took game: Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 61.

  48 standard practice for all commoners’ dogs: Jesse, Researches into the History of the British Dog, 1:375.

  48 “many dead throughout the city”: Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Penguin, 1982), 58.

  48 one chronicle reports grave diggers: Joseph Patrick Byrne, The Black Death (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 108.

  49 “as if they were mounds of hay”: Joseph Patrick Byrne, Daily Life During the Black Death (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006), 101.

  49 In painted plague scenes: Christine Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconology and Iconography (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2000), 64.

  49 the expression “six feet under”: Ibid., 16.

  50 The preeminent Arab physician: Anna Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 35.

  50 a tract theorizing that the new: Ibid., 47–51.

  50 Gentile of Foligno thought: Ibid., 53–55.

  50 A tractate from the medical faculty: Ibid., 55–58.

  50 Alfonso of Córdoba likewise blamed: Ibid., 52–53.

  51 a physician from the French town: Ibid., 60–62.

  51 “festering boils…break out on people”: Exodus 9:8–9.

  52 a massive swine flu epidemic: Francisco Guerra, “The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493,” Social Science History 12, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 313–19.

  52 put the death toll from disease in Hispaniola: Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World E
pidemics (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003), 51.

  52 “the cause of the ailments so common among us”: Ibid., 50.

  52 an English-language translation and expansion: Edward, second Duke of York, The Master of Game (New York: Duffield, 1909), 85–104.

  54 historians have found annual outlays: Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 30.

  55 By 1288, a French wag: From XMLittré, an online version (hosted at http://francois.gannaz.free.fr/Littre/) of Émile Littré’s 1863 historical dictionary of the French language. Many thanks to Jon Lackman for the interpretation.

  55 by 1678: Ibid.

  56 “is that illness is not a metaphor”: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001), 3.

  56 Through assiduous translation to Arabic: Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Cairo: American University Press in Cairo, 2007), 16, 83, 97–98.

  57 By the tenth century, Baghdad: Ibid., 83.

  57 the thirteenth century saw the establishment: Ibid., 97–98.

  57 a process akin to scholarly peer review: Ray Spier, “The History of the Peer-Review Process,” Trends in Biotechnology 20, no. 8 (Aug. 2002): 357.

  57 “There was with us in hospital”: Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 116.

  57 His preferred treatment for bites: Jean Théodoridès, Histoire de la rage: Cave canem (Paris: Masson, 1986), 48. Thanks to Alex Bedrosyan of the Columbia University Tutoring and Translation Agency for the translation.

  57 he anchors his observation with a personal narrative: Ibid., 50.

  58 the great doctor expressed the belief that heat and cold: Ibid., 48–49.

  58 A fairly lengthy treatment of rabies: The Medical Writings of Moses Maimonides (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963), 1:67–72.

  59 Artifact collectors have preserved: Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 152.

  59 They were blood relatives of Saint Catherine: Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Charismatic Healers on Iberian Soil: An Autopsy of a Mythical Complex of Early Modern Spain,” Folklore 118 (April 2007): 44–46.

  59 In 1619, a shoemaker named Gabriel Monteche: María Tausiet, “Healing Virtue: Saludadores Versus Witches in Early Modern Spain,” Medical History Supplement 29 (2009): 47–48.

  61 On two occasions during the 1570s: William Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 6, 11, 29, 40.

  61 saludadores also had a reputation: Tausiet, “Healing Virtue,” 50–51.

  Chapter 3: A Virus with Teeth?

  65 Over four densely cited pages: Juan Gómez-Alonso, “Rabies: A Possible Explanation for the Vampire Legend,” Neurology 51, no. 3 (1998): 856–59.

  65 Even Playboy weighed in: “Humping Like Rabids,” Playboy, March 1, 1999.

  66 does raise many intriguing parallels: Gómez-Alonso, “Rabies.”

  67 “nothing was spoken of but vampires”: Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), 6:306.

  67 the self-described age of reason: Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idriceanu, Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 19.

  69 “Frightened, [Lycaon] runs off”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), book 1, 323–32.

  69 Old Norse gives us the legend: Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (New York: Causeway Books, 1973), 39–40.

  70 the Laighne Faelaidh, a race of men: George Henderson, Survivals in Belief Among the Celts (Glasgow: J. Maclehose & Sons, 1911), 170.

  70 A number of ancient Indo-European tribal names: Ian Woodward, The Werewolf Delusion (London: Paddington Press, 1979), 30.

  70 When Herodotus writes of the Neurians: Baring-Gould, Book of Were-Wolves, 9.

  70 an account of a half-human tribe in India: David Gordon-White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 49.

  70 Strabo, a geographer from the first century: Patricia Dale-Green, Lore of the Dog (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 170.

  70 Similarly, the Ch’i-tan: Gordon-White, Myths of the Dog-Man, 133.

  70 cynocephali, or “dog-headed men”: Ibid., 63.

  71 a taxonomy for the thousands: Barbara Allen Woods, The Devil in Dog Form: A Partial Type-Index of Devil Legends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

  71 “If there is any merit”: Ibid., 33.

  72 Nicholas Remy turned this same reasoning: Nicholas Remy, Demonolatry (London: J. Rodker, 1930), 70.

  72 moments of particular wickedness: Woods, Devil in Dog Form.

  72 “with strange pleading eyes”: Ibid., 77.

  73 “That which is once forsworn”: Ibid., 113.

  73 Elizabeth Clarke, who during the seventeenth: Dale-Green, Lore of the Dog, 79.

  73 Alison’s account of her dog’s attack: E. Lynn Linton, Witch Stories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1861), 270.

  74 1521. Two admitted werewolves: Bartlett and Idriceanu, Legends of Blood, 94.

  74 1530. Near Poitiers, three enormous wolves: Montague Summers, The Werewolf (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1933), 225.

  74 1541. A farmer in Pavia: Baring-Gould, Book of Were-Wolves, 64–65.

  74 1558. Near Apchon: Summers, Werewolf, 228.

  75 1573. The town of Dole: Baring-Gould, Book of Were-Wolves, 74–78.

  75 1598. An entire family: Ibid., 78–81.

  75 That same year, near Angers: Ibid., 81–84.

  75–76 1603. Jean Grenier…snatched from a cradle: Ibid., 85–99.

  77 “confessed to me also”: Pierre de Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches, trans. Gerhild Scholz Williams (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 331.

  77 an account of rabies in 1702: Richard Mead, A Mechanical Account of Poisons (London: J. Brindley, 1745), 150–51.

  78 Mead even goes so far: Ibid., 154–55.

  78 Like many physicians of his day: Anna Marie Roos, “Luminaries in Medicine: Richard Mead, James Gibbs, and Solar and Lunar Effects on the Human Body in Early Modern England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 3 (Fall 2000).

  78 “varied both in colour and magnitude”: Ibid., 445.

  78 “depended upon the lunar force”: Richard Mead, A Treatise Concerning the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human Bodies (London: J. Brindley, 1748), 64.

  78 the “legend of the torn garment”: Woods, Devil in Dog Form, 95.

  79 a vampire account from Baghdad: Baring-Gould, Book of Were-Wolves, 253.

  79 the remedy for dog bite that Richard Mead: Mead, Mechanical Account of Poisons, 164–65.

  80 “recovered without the help”: Ibid., 178.

  80 “sucking the blood of people and cattle”: Bartlett and Idriceanu, Legends of Blood, 12.

  80 the great wave arrived: Ibid., 13.

  81 “After it had been reported”: From Paul Barber’s translation of “Visum et repertum,” included in Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 16.

  82 the release of pent-up gases: Ibid., 161.

  82 a tale from Siret, in northern Romania: Matthew Beresford, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (London: Reaktion, 2008), 64.

  82 another folklorist lists the animal forms: Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 87.

  83–84 The proprietor of a hotel across the lake: Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler, The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (New York: Little, Brown, 2006).

  85 Goaded by a lover, Polidori: David Lorne Macdonald, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 95–97.

  86 “Usually they bite at night”: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, trans. Sterling Stoudemire, Natural History of the West Indies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 62.

  86 Translations of Oviedo’s abridged history: Kathleen
Myers, Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 3–4.

  87 a 1796 account of his years in Suriname: J. G. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam…(London: J. Johnson, 1806), 146–47.

  88 Goya was using spectral, bat-like figures: James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981), 20–29.

  88 “whole circumstance has lately been doubted”: Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, entry for April 9.

  Chapter 4: Canicide

  91 “One cannot conceive,” Campbell wrote: Millennial Harbinger 5, no. 1 (1848): 267–69.

  92 Rumor had it that to end: Notes and Queries 6, no. 148 (1852): 207.

  92 as one admirer noted years after her death: Charles Waterton, Essays on Natural History: Third Series (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857), 177.

  92 “no nose was so much talked of”: Quoted in “Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe,” Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers, July 1889.

  93 An 1830 paper in the Lancet: Lancet, Feb. 6, 1830, 619.

  93 “Not only a most disgusting”: Alfred Swaine Taylor, On Poisons in Relation to Medical Jurisprudence and Medicine (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848), 457.

  93 another called it “degrading”: Medical Adviser, and Guide to Health and Long Life, Oct. 2, 1824, 242.

  93 believed to be some 100,000 pet dogs: Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 53–54.

  94 “the degraded state and savage disposition”: Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London: John Murray, 1868), 2:46. Harriet Ritvo’s splendid book The Animal Estate draws out this theme in far more detail.

  94 ten times more likely to die: Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 169–70.

  95 a list of twenty-one supposed causes: Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations (Philadelphia: J. Conrad, 1805), 2:303–5.