Rabid (33 page)

  1  
Consider the kamikaze bobcat in Cottonwood:
John Faherty, “No Tall Tale: Rabid Bobcat Invades Cottonwood Bar,”
Arizona Republic,
March 27, 2009.

  1  
Or the frenzied otter in Vero Beach:
Associated Press, May 27, 2007.

  1  
Or the enraged beaver in the Loch Raven Reservoir:
Bob Allen,
North County News,
Aug. 22, 2007.

  2  
one young couple in the Adirondack hamlet:
Bob Condon, “Man Bitten in Attack by Rabid Fox,”
Glens Falls Post-Star,
April 9, 2008.

  2  
“What disturbs me,” remarked one Connecticut man:
NBC Connecticut, Aug. 18, 2010.

  2  
For one victim in Putnam County:
This American Life,
Oct. 27, 2006.

  2  
the red fox in South Carolina:
Jill Coley, “Deadly, Grisly Rabies Still Threat in Lowcountry,”
Charleston Post and Courier,
Nov. 20, 2008.

  3  
a dog was attacked by a mad peccary:
KPHO.com
, Feb. 18, 2011.

  3  
a skunk that beset the pet Pekingese
:
ThePilot.com
, Nov. 24, 2010.

  3  
a donkey fell prey to the madness:
Brennan Leathers, “Donkey Bite Prompts Rabies Warning,”
Post-Searchlight,
Jan. 12, 2011.

  3  
In Imperial, Nebraska, the afflicted animal:
Russ Pankonin, “Rabid Sheep Causes Stir at the Fair,”
Imperial Republican,
Sept. 3, 2010.

  4  
“the lethal gift of livestock”:
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 195.

  4  
“breathed out nastier germs”:
Ibid., 195.

  5  
Susan Sontag noted that even as late as:
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
(New York: Picador, 2001), 126–27.
Illness as Metaphor
was originally published in 1978;
AIDS and Its Metaphors,
from which this particular insight was drawn, was originally published in 1988.

  6  
King of the Hill:
“To Kill a Ladybird,” December 12, 1999.

  6  
Beavis and Butt-Head:
“Rabies Scare,” March 18, 1994.

  6  
Scrubs:
“My Lunch,” April 25, 2006.

  6  
The Office:
“Fun Run,” September 27, 2007.

  6  
fifty-five thousand, in the estimate:
World Health Organization, September 2011.

  7  
a portrait of Lennox as a boy:
George Romney,
Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond, Duke of Lennox, and of Aubigny
(ca. 1776–77).

  7  
so named in honor of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher:
Rosemary Baird,
Goodwood: Art and Architecture, Sport and Family
(London: Frances Lincoln, 2007), 170.

  8  
it began one day with shoulder pains:
Alan C. Jackson, “The Fatal Neurologic Illness of the Fourth Duke of Richmond in Canada: Rabies,”
Annals of the RCPSC
27, no. 1 (Feb. 1994).

  8  
On YouTube one can find video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtiytblJzQc
.

  8   “
I don’t know how it is”:
Frederic Tolfrey,
The Sportsman in Canada,
Vol. 2
(London: T. C. Newby, 1845), 228.

  9  
The next day, the duke ate and drank:
Jackson, “Fatal Neurologic Illness.”

  9  
so repelled was he by the water in the basin:
Baird,
Goodwood,
170.

  9  
“the patient is seized with sudden terror”:
Armand Trousseau,
Lectures on Clinical Medicine
(Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1873), 2:85.

  9  
sometimes occurring at a rate of once per hour:
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
59, no. 38 (2010): 1236–38.

  9  
an unfortunate porter who suffered such emissions:
Armand Trousseau,
Lectures on Clinical Medicine
(Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1867), 1:686.

 10  
the duke dictated a lengthy letter:
Baird,
Goodwood,
171.

 10  
once saw Pasteur perform this trick:
Axel Munthe,
The Story of San Michele
(New York: Dutton, 1930), 51.

 10  
“At the beginning of each session” :
Patrice Debré,
Louis Pasteur,
trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 430.

 15  
“Mix us stronger drink”:
The Iliad of Homer,
trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 9.203.

 15  
“I have learned to be valiant”:
Ibid., 6.444.

 16  
“a hunting hound in the speed of his feet”:
Ibid., 8.338–39.

 16  
his pitch to Achilles:
Ibid., 9.238–39.

 16  
no fewer than nine terms:
Thomas Walsh,
Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 1–3.

 16  
It has not been invoked anywhere in the poem:
The definitive accounting of
lyssa
in Homer is Bruce Lincoln’s essay “Homeric
Lyssa:
‘Wolfish Rage,’” in
Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 131–37.

 16  
goading Heracles to slay his family:
Euripides,
Heracles.

 16  
Pentheus’s own mother and aunt:
Euripides,
The Bacchae.

 16  
a feminine form wearing a dog’s head:
One such image is here:
http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/N17.1.html
.

 17  
“as a snake waits for a man by his hole”:
Iliad of Homer,
trans. Lattimore, 22.93.

 17  
“powerful
lyssa
unrelentingly possesses”:
Iliad
21:242–43; translated in Lincoln, “Homeric
Lyssa:
‘Wolfish Rage.’”

 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.

 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 Epidemics
(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.