In 1847, the American evangelist Alexander Campbell traveled through Europe, sending home sporadic reports to be published in the monthly magazine he founded, entitled the Millennial Harbinger. In the northern wilds of Scotland, Campbell came across a melancholy scene, which he painted with a sensitivity and delicacy befitting a man of the cloth. On his long journey from Aberdeen to Banff, he stopped to visit the lovingly cultivated but nearly uninhabited estate of James Duff, fourth Earl of Fife, who lived there at the musty old age of seventy-one without family and with few servants. A nocturnal creature in this enormous, unfinished castle, Duff typically awoke at five in the afternoon and returned to his bed by five in the morning. “One cannot conceive,” Campbell wrote, “why he should live in the midst of such fine gardens and groves, ornamented with beautiful walks, summer-houses, alcoves; bowers, jetteaus, &c., as environ his splendid residence, to be surveyed by himself for an hour or two in the evening of the day.” But, the pastor allowed, Duff did have one reasonable excuse. Forty-two years beforehand, his wife—the former Maria Caroline Manners, a legendary beauty—had died at the age of thirty, just six years after their marriage, leaving him no children. The cause was “the canine madness”; she was “bitten by her own rabid lap-dog.”
One can hardly blame Duff for failing to recover or remarry. His wife’s death in 1805 had left Edinburgh startled and not a small measure scandalized, as much for its peculiar beginnings as for its horrific conclusion. At some point during the previous year, four dogs of the Duff family had suffered bites from a rabid attacker. Three of these dogs belonged to the earl and were immediately put down. But the lady could not bear to lose her own lapdog, a French poodle named Pompey—a fitting allusion, it would seem, to unforeseen disaster. The creature was spared, but it proved to be a tragic pardon.
Many months later, the fateful symptoms began to appear in the lapdog and then, sometime later, in the lap’s owner. Rumor had it that to end her agonizing spasms, it was necessary to smother the splendid lady to death, though her doctors later insisted this had not been the case. Known to all as a dazzling beauty, Mrs. Duff was subsequently memorialized in a popular engraving, well trafficked for decades afterward, that showed the young lady stepping atop the crest of a globe, bearing aloft a sash and attended by cherubs whose presence connoted an ascent (as one admirer noted years after her death) to “another, and a better world.”
The precise mode of transmission remains disputed to this day. Soon after the event, the general opinion was that Pompey had nipped her on the tip of the nose. One Edinburgh wag, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, quipped that “no nose was so much talked of since the days of Tristram’s Don Diego” and went on to describe the town’s general uproar:
Not a grain of rouge was left on a single cheek in E[dinburgh] with weeping; not one female tongue ceased talking of the catastrophe for a week. “Oh, she was such a sweet creature!” She had bought a whole cargo of silk stockings the day before she fell ill, and expected new liveries for her footmen every moment. Indeed, she had not one fault on the face of the earth. She was to have been at a ball the very night she died.
But later there seems to have been a consensus, developed among doctors, that the poodle was innocent of even a bite and that its friendly licks alone had spread the dreaded disease. An 1830 paper in the Lancet laid out this particular theory in detail. “She had a small pimple on her chin, of which she had rubbed off the top,” wrote William Lawrence, one of the journal’s founders; “and allowing the dog to indulge in its usual caresses, it licked this pimple, of which the surface was exposed.” Subsequent reports (perhaps following Lawrence) also specifically cited a pimple as having been the aperture to infection.
True or false, this invocation of unseemly acne on the fair Mrs. Duff’s visage also comported with the general disapproval, among nineteenth-century medical men, of the intimate canine congress to which lapdoggery led. The act of allowing a cur to lick a human face was, to their minds, the height of uncleanliness. “Not only a most disgusting, but a dangerous practice,” intoned one medical author, in discussing the Duff case; another called it “degrading” and “reprehensible” and went so far as to say, “I unequivocally condemn an indiscriminate attachment to, or imprudent fondling of dogs.”
In their scorn, these men of science were responding to a genuine sea change in the way pets, and in particular dogs, were regarded in the industrializing precincts of Europe and the United States. With the rise of a middle class, no longer tied to farms and their necessarily instrumental approach to animals, the treasured, pampered pet no longer figured as merely a luxury of the upper classes. In 1840s Paris, whose human population was just shy of a million, there were believed to be some 100,000 pet dogs. The nineteenth century saw the rise of dog shows (with more than three hundred held each year in England by century’s end) and “dog fancy” in general, a practice that could be joined even by those of modest means. Ever more citizens during the sweep of this century found themselves inclined to agree with Lord Byron’s epitaph for his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain: “To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; I never met but one—and here he lies.” (Boatswain expired from rabies in 1808, at which time Byron had him interred on the grounds of Newstead Abbey, the family’s ancestral home; three years later, Byron specified in his will that he be buried at Boatswain’s side, though this instruction was later countermanded.)
This transformation in pet-keeping was taking place at the same time that Europeans, with the increase in literacy and the explosion of the press, began to learn more about life in their ever-expanding colonies. Perhaps inevitably, the distinction between the familiar, domesticated pet and the ungovernable wild animal came to be seen as analogous to that between civilized and savage races. When Charles Darwin, in his 1868 treatise on domestication, remarked upon the tendency of half-bred animals to revert to a wild nature, he compared this to “the degraded state and savage disposition of crossed races of man” and approvingly quoted an assessment made to the famed Dr. Livingstone by a Zambezi native in Africa: “God made white men, and God made black men, but the Devil made half-castes.” With animals as with man, domestication and fine breeding were seen to bestow a moral as well as a physical fitness.
By insinuating itself into domestic tranquillity—by effecting the fall of Pompey, as it were—rabies presented itself as a shocking subversion of this order. As such, it became an object of disproportionate panic throughout the nineteenth century. Reports of allegedly mad dogs studded the newspapers. Stories of actual hydrophobic expiry were granted full columns stuffed with florid detail. Neighborhood councils formed to beat back the scourge of feral dogs, even as tuberculosis and cholera cut wide and far more fatal swaths through their same streets. As the historian Harriet Ritvo has pointed out, a person of that era (in England, at least) was ten times more likely to die of even murder than of rabies. But a death at the hand of man seemed far less horrible to contemplate than one suffered in the jaws of the devil.
Compounding the terror was the fact that science understood rabies little better at the start of the nineteenth century than it did at the end of the second. Good old Soranus of Ephesus, as handed down to us by Caelius Aurelianus, had a more sensible take on the causes and nature of hydrophobia than did many medical men of 1800. When Benjamin Rush, one of the United States’ most esteemed doctors and medical authors of revolutionary times, published his thoughts on the disease near the turn of the century, he began with a list of twenty-one supposed causes of hydrophobia, and the bite of a rabid animal did, mercifully, place first. But the balance of the list included “cold night air,” “eating beech nuts,” “a fall,” and “an involuntary association of ideas.” Seventeen centuries after Soranus and Sus´ruta had each succeeded in largely differentiating rabies from other maladies—not fully, to be sure, and not quite with rigor, but nevertheless judiciously—medicine was once again having difficulty in doing so.
Though a colonist, Rush was far from a rube by European medical standards. For his doctoral training he braved the ocean voyage to Edinburgh, whose university housed one of the late eighteenth century’s finest medical schools. There he was steeped in the teachings of the top European minds of the day, in particular Herman Boerhaave, the revered Dutch theorist who had died in 1738 but remained the towering figure in medical instruction throughout Europe. The chair of Edinburgh’s medical school was William Cullen, a world-renowned doctor and thinker in his own right, though his views diverged only slightly from Boerhaave’s. (On those instances when they did diverge, Cullen later recalled, he was immediately decried as “a whimsical innovator” whose apostasy would “hurt myself and the University also.”) Still influenced by Newton and his revolution in physics, these eighteenth-century doctors saw the body mechanistically, as a sort of hydraulic contraption of solids interacting with fluids, or “humors.” In their view, diseases often were corruptions of these humors, which could become overly acidic or alkaline. In assigning causes, the theory looked disproportionately to diet, reasoning that just as food could undergo insalubrious transformations outside the body, through spoilage and so on, it could also effect corruption on the inside.
From November to May, Rush imbibed these theories six days a week, with almost no leisure time to speak of. The typical day involved studying all morning, then classes and hospital rounds in the afternoon, followed by still more reading until midnight. Edinburgh also schooled Rush in the experimental method. His chemistry teacher, Joseph Black, himself had used the occasion of his doctoral dissertation to prove the existence of carbon dioxide (or “fixed air,” as he called it), a result that opened the door to the discovery of oxygen. By comparison, Rush’s own dissertation, an inquiry into the acidity of the stomach during digestion, was rather less impressive in both methodology and results. “Having dined on beef, peas, and bread,” he wrote, “I puked up, about three hours afterwards, the contents of my stomach, by means of a grain of tartar emetic, and found them not only acid to the taste, but likewise that they afforded a red color, upon being mixed with the syrup of violets—an invariable mark this, of acidity, among chemists!”
Nevertheless, when Rush returned to America, he was appointed professor of chemistry by the College of Philadelphia. This made him, at twenty-three, the first chemistry professor in what was soon to become the United States. A staunch supporter of American nationhood, Rush eventually had the opportunity, as a member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation of 1776, to sign the Declaration of Independence, and during that tumultuous era he increasingly wedded his politics to his profession. After the Tea Act, Rush played upon his status as a noted physician to showily condemn tea itself, as having “mischievous effects on the nervous system,” and as the Revolution loomed, he applied his chemistry, too, penning three essays about how to make saltpeter—the crucial ingredient in gunpowder—from dried tobacco stalks; Congress later distributed these essays as a pamphlet, with an introduction by Ben Franklin. During the Second Continental Congress, Rush inoculated Patrick Henry against smallpox, and at Trenton, after George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware, Rush was on hand to perform battlefield medicine.*
Rush believed that rabies was, in essence, a “malignant state of fever.” In this opinion he was following a tradition, beginning at least with Boerhaave, that fever could be the immediate (though not always the root) cause of hydrophobia. Boerhaave attributed this fever to “inflammation,” a catchall concept in his mechanistic theory. Cullen, following this notion, developed the idea that such fevers were caused by “overstimulation” due to excess blood. The natural prescription, therefore, was bleeding, which is indeed what Rush advocates for the rabies sufferer. Rush’s main evidence for hydrophobia being an “inflammatory fever” is his observations of the blood, which, when drawn, exhibits both “size” (a term then for viscosity) and yellowness in its serum. He recalls that the blood “was uncommonly sizy in a boy of Mr. George Oakley whom I saw, and bled for the first time, on the fourth day of his disease, in the beginning of the year 1797. His pulse imparted to the fingers the same kind of quick and tense stroke which is common in an acute inflammatory fever.”
One of Rush’s medical students, James Mease, held a somewhat more accurate view—that hydrophobia was a disease of the nervous system—and, awkwardly for the two men, this view had seemingly been endorsed by Rush before the teacher later contradicted his pupil. Mease had laid out this theory in his 1792 doctoral thesis on the disease, which he had dedicated to Rush and for which Rush had even supplied a preface.† In 1801, chagrined to see that his old professor had now published a contrary opinion, Mease furiously produced a second pamphlet on rabies, this one explicitly addressed to Rush. Point by strenuous point he set out to rebut his former mentor. The woundedness of Mease’s tone as he did so (beginning with his florid prefatory note to Rush himself, telling the great physician that he has mistakenly returned to principles “previously destroyed by yourself”) was understandable given the personal connection between the two men. A family friend, Rush had known the young Mease since infancy and personally treated him through several serious childhood illnesses. “One of the first things I can remember,” Mease later recalled, was Rush “calling me ‘his boy,’ and he used frequently to say that I should be his apprentice.” This latter prediction, which Mease averred was “probably in jest,” was eventually realized when Mease enrolled for medical training at the College of Philadelphia.
In many respects, Mease’s gloss on rabies is hardly more helpful than Rush’s. He asserts that the illness can sometimes generate spontaneously in dogs, a widespread theory (as we will discuss later in this chapter) that seriously set back attempts to contain and control the disease. And by contemporary standards, his preferred treatment for hydrophobia—powdered jimsonweed—is every bit as daft as bleeding. But Mease does draw one very perceptive comparison that had eluded medical authors until then. Noting the irregularity of the onset of hydrophobia (the fact that the time between bite and symptoms is usually weeks, or as long as months) Mease realized that another illness involving puncture wounds behaves in a similarly odd way: namely, tetanus, or lockjaw. From what we know today, the two are different in many crucial respects: rabies is a virus, which travels up the nerve sheathings, whereas tetanus is a bacterium, with the chemical poison released by that bacterium, rather than the bacterium itself, journeying up the nerves. But rabies and tetanus are cousins, as it were, in that they are among the few pathogens whose malign effects spread along the nerves instead of the bloodstream, creating the strange phenomenon of a disease whose time of onset depends on the distance of the wound from the head.
Such minor flashes of insight aside, all these millennia of medical theorizing about rabies had yielded little usable knowledge. The reason for this, of course, is that medicine had yet to embrace the most crucial insight of all: the very existence of viruses and bacteria, agents of disease unseeable by the naked eye. At the time of Rush and Mease, science possessed neither the complex optics nor the practical wisdom required to make this leap. Less than a century later, seventeen centuries of stasis in our understanding of rabies would be obliterated—and largely by the dogged efforts and remarkable genius of a single man.
During one particularly bad rabies outbreak in England, the Liverpool Daily Post published a comical ditty, called “The Two Dog Shows,” that captured perfectly the stark dichotomy in the canine universe, between the increasingly cherished domestic and the increasingly terrifying feral. The poem began:
All London for the past few days, as you, of course, well know,
Has crowded Islington to see the Great Dog Show;
Which has been totally eclipsed by Liverpool: we find
They’ve had a dog show there for weeks of quite another kind,
One which is “open every day” in all the streets and lanes;
And which consist of tortured dogs, and dogs without their brains.
The nineteenth century was indeed the best and the worst of times for the Western dog, the most fortunate of which had finally been invited onto the foot of the bed, but the least fortunate of which met brutal ends in large numbers at the hands of exercised humans. In France, whose reputation as a locus of pet pampering was well deserved (one contemporary book on dogs stated, on its first page, “Le chien est une machine à aimer,” that is, “The dog is a love machine”), rabies fears in Paris led to “Great Dog Massacres,” sometimes called “canicides”—the tally in 1879 alone was 9,479 killed. In England, the preferred method of dispatch was beating the dogs to death with truncheons. Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, two University of Manchester historians who have studied the history of rabies in Britain, note that from the perspective of dog lovers, terror of the disease had “turned ordinary people into murderers.”
With little surety to be found in medicine, observers were left to formulate their own theories about which dogs should and should not be trusted. To some, domestication itself was seen as the enemy—“Constantinople and Africa are rabies-free,” it was often noted, erroneously—even as reports were coming in from India that the disease ran rampant among wild dogs and jackals. Some people believed that the best-kept dogs were the most dangerous—that too much idleness, combined with overfeeding, predisposed them to the disease; that the inbreeding of purebred dogs “exhausted” their “nervous system” and made them susceptible. (As one correspondent remarked in the pages of what must be the best-titled publication in history, the Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette, “Hydrophobia makes its appearance…in dogs which exist in a state of confinement which are kept in towns and take little exercise.”) Different theories fingered different breeds as the primary culprits: retrievers, in one view; foxhounds, in another.
Most common of all, of course, was to blame the dogs of the lower classes. This was largely the view of animal-welfare advocates, who naturally believed that mistreated dogs, such as those made to pull carts (still a surprisingly common practice) or fight in rings, were the most susceptible. But in most people’s minds, it seemed clear that the degradation of the dogs was merely analogous to the degradation of their owners. One letter writer to the London Times remarked that these curs “infest our streets unmolested, creating noise, filth, and general annoyance; nor is this all, the peculiar sexual intercourse of the species renders them very dangerous. I have seen a whole gang of curs so strong excited, as to be little short of mad—so furious, indeed, as to change their very natures.” Wrote another correspondent to the Times, “If these no-breed curs, which are at least two hundred to one, were destroyed, there would be little fear of hydrophobia.” In the 1850s, France created its dog tax for the stated purpose of discouraging dog ownership among the poor. Britain had a similar tax, though it was levied only on dogs more than six months old, which wound up worsening the problem it aimed to fix: families would often acquire adorable puppies and then dump them on the streets, leaving them to grow up wild.
In the end, no dog could be trusted. Indeed, some experts cautioned that uncommon affection, of all things, could herald the onset of rabies. George Fleming, the British veterinarian whose 1872 treatise on hydrophobia was probably the definitive English-language survey in the pre-Pasteur era, warned against the “Judas’ kiss” of the rabid pet, explaining that
its instinct impels it, at times, to draw near to its master, as if to ask for relief from its sufferings; and, if permitted, it willingly tenders its recognition of the care bestowed on it by licking the hands or face. But these are perfidious caresses, against which every one should be warned.
The French physician G. E. Fredet took this admonition further. In his view, this behavior in the early stages of rabies was not occasional and not confined to masters alone. Instead, such dogs “invariably express an exaggerated attachment and devotion to everyone who approaches them.” That is: even the friendliest dog on the street, or in an acquaintance’s home, might suddenly deliver a bite (or lick!) that became a death sentence.
Given this dual nature of the dog, it is perhaps easy to imagine why fiction of the gothic persuasion, when hoping to conjure an atmosphere of gloom, would trot out so many snarling curs. Few gothic novels play this card better, or at least more often, than Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In the very first pages, when the tenant Lockwood walks up to visit his brooding landlord, Heathcliff, the visitor’s unwelcomeness is underscored by the hostility of his host’s dogs—in particular the mother dog, a “liver-coloured bitch pointer” that “broke into a fury, and leapt on my knees” and that (along with half a dozen other “four-footed fiends, of various sizes”) Lockwood is left to fend off with a fireplace poker. During the ensuing snowstorm, when he tries to escape Wuthering Heights by borrowing one of the house’s lanterns, the servant sics the slavering dogs on him to prevent the theft; on order, “two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the light.”
It continues this way through much of the novel. A similar dog attack, we soon learn, played a pivotal role in the tale of Heathcliff and his lost love, Catherine Earnshaw. Although the two were inseparable for many years as children, Catherine’s life takes a turn when Skulker, the family bulldog of the wealthy Lintons, sets upon her savagely outside the Linton home. Heathcliff attempts to free her, prying at the dog’s jaws with a rock, but the beast holds fast, “his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendant lips streaming with bloody slaver.” Found mangled in the grip of this beast, Catherine is briefly adopted by the Lintons, who nurse her for five weeks—during which time she takes up, at least in part, not only their upper-class values but also an attachment for their son, Edgar, who thereafter will rival Heathcliff for her love.
And indeed, during the final days of Catherine’s life, in the throes of a childbirth that will kill her, Heathcliff is possessed by what Brontë describes as something akin to canine madness, as the servant Nelly recounts:
Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive. In fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species; it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so, I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.
Emily Brontë herself beheld both aspects of the nineteenth-century dog while growing up in her father’s parsonage. On the one side, there was her bulldog, Keeper, whose penchant for napping on the family’s beds upstairs was not tolerated but nevertheless fondly recollected. On the other side, there was the strange dog, clearly in distress, perhaps thirsty, to whom Emily offered water one day as a child. The dog, rabid, bit her. Emily immediately strode into the kitchen, grabbed an iron that Tabby, the family cook, kept heated there, and cauterized her own wound. She told no one of the incident until much later, after the danger of infection had presumably passed.
After Emily’s death, her sister Charlotte brought the incident into her novel Shirley. The bitten party became not a child but a young woman, the novel’s fierce and wealthy protagonist, Shirley Keeldar; the bite, and her concealment of it, becomes the pretext by which the headstrong Shirley softens her heart to marrying the penniless tutor Louis Moore, who has proposed to her. She fears that she will die, and she confesses this to Louis. As he comforts her with what today seems laughably false confidence (“I doubt whether the smallest particle of virus mingled with your blood: and if it did, let me assure you that—young, healthy, faultlessly sound as you are—no harm will ensue”), it is clear that Shirley’s resistance to his romantic advances has melted. Charlotte told one of her early biographers, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, that Shirley is as Emily “would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity.”*
Of Charlotte’s four novels, fully two boast rabies subplots. In Shirley, as we have seen, the disease serves as pretext for a hard-edged woman to marry; in The Professor, it serves as shorthand for a father’s manly duty. The narrator (and professor of the title), William Crimsworth, describes his son by telling the story of when the boy’s mastiff, Yorke, was bitten by a rabid street dog. As soon as the elder Crimsworth discovers this fact, he immediately shoots Yorke dead, not knowing that the son is looking on in horror. The boy proceeds to make a spectacle of his grief for weeks, even prostrating himself out on the dog’s burial mound. Like Old Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird in our own time, The Professor uses rabies above all as a means to establish a man’s courage, to delineate his duty and his dominion.
In many ways, though, it is Charlotte’s first and most famous novel, Jane Eyre, that captures best the zoonotic idea, the animalistic infection of which rabies serves as progenitor. When Jane becomes the employee, and later the fiancée, of Edward Rochester, her happiness and indeed her very life are threatened by a sinister presence in the attic, a madwoman whom we eventually learn to be Bertha Rochester, Edward’s violently insane wife. Bertha’s own brother, Richard Mason, is slashed and then savagely bitten by her in the night. Eventually, the creature appears to Jane in her room, soon before she herself is supposed to marry Edward. Jane recalls the encounter to him the following day:
“It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!…[T]he lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?”
“You may.”
“Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.”
Although Bertha Rochester is not, the reader soon discovers, in any way a supernatural being, she nevertheless places Jane Eyre squarely in the nineteenth-century genre of monster tales—stories of humans who are not entirely human, who are tinged (indeed cursed) with some element of the animal or the bestial. In his book Knowing Fear, the horror scholar Jason Colavito charts the nineteenth-century rise in literature of what he calls “biological horror,” featuring fully corporeal malefactors that “embody in their beings the struggle of humanity to re-imagine its relationship with the animal kingdom and the natural world.” Thus the emergence of the monster, the non-man man, “a bizarre liminal creature poised somewhere on the continuum between man and beast.”
It would be too much to credit rabies alone with the nineteenth-century boom in monster lore. But the (trumped-up) threat of hydrophobia did foment, and in turn exploit, the same visceral fear: that any proper middle- or upper-class man or woman, refined above any condition of existence that one could possibly consider base or animalistic, might suddenly and through no fault of his or her own be gripped by an insensate and subhuman savagery. This fear was well captured in an 1830 letter to the London Times, addressed from Boodle’s, the tony gentlemen’s club on St. James’s Street, and genteelly bylined “A Constant Reader.” “Who,” asked this anonymous gentleman, during the height of that year’s rabies outbreak,
is there among us—either at the east or west end of the town—that can leave his home in the morning, and say that he may not return in a few hours, brought back in a state that would reduce him to the desperation and frenzy of a demon, and from which a horrible death can alone relieve him?
The man’s unsubtle invocation of class (“at the east or west end”), nominally democratic, in fact serves the opposite function—pointing out that the most horrifying form of hydrophobia is the one that grips the man of means.
It is no accident that the most hysteria-inducing monsters of the era, factual or fictional, clambered their terrifying forms out of polite society. It was important that Dracula, like Polidori’s Byronesque vampire, was an aristocrat in order for his murderous deeds to be truly chilling. The reader’s shock at the actions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde—“with ape-like fury,” for example, “trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered”—was secondary to her shock that he was, in fact, the genteel Dr. Jekyll. Much the same was true of the real-life legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, a cloaked marauder, widely believed to be a nobleman, who attacked at least two young women in the London suburbs in 1837 and then persisted for decades as an English bogeyman, widely seen but never captured. After breathing fire into his victim’s faces, he slashed at them with taloned hands and then escaped by leaping improbable distances.
That such monstrous transformations could be effected in even the most refined gentleman made clear the ease with which they might also befall oneself; as the aforementioned French doctor, G. E. Fredet, put it about rabies: “Leaving to the patient all the faculties of his intelligence intact, he sees himself die.” Across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe revolutionized the horror genre in part through his chilling use of first-person narration in describing just these sorts of descents into subhuman madness. In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” the most chilling dimension of Poe’s murderous narrators is not the savagery of their crimes but the contrast between that savagery and their evident intellect, and the deterioration of that intellect in a way that strikes the literate reader as all too believable. “The Black Cat,” in particular, is a conjuring trick, a narrative that begins in the mode of a sedate personal memoir (“From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition”) but soon sinks slowly into deepening depredations. First, the narrator mutilates his cherished cat: “the fury of a demon instantly possessed me”—he might as well have said “frenzy”—as he cuts an eye from the yowling animal’s head. Then, as his madness deepens, and as his guilt over this misdeed compounds, he is driven (in “a rage more than demoniacal”) to murder his wife with an ax and wall up her corpse in the cellar. Again, as Ovid demonstrated in his retelling of Actaeon’s fate, the only thing more terrifying than the violence is a firsthand witnessing of the bestial metamorphosis that provoked it. These tales warn us that we are all vulnerable to the madness, capable of the savagery it inspires.
As it happens, Poe himself descended into madness in the hours preceding his death. Found unconscious on the streets of Baltimore on October 3, 1849, he was brought to Dr. John J. Moran of the Baltimore City and Marine Hospital. Though Poe was known for trouble with alcohol, the driver who picked him up swore to Moran the fallen man did not smell of drink. Soon, the author began engaging in (as Moran later described it in a letter) “vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls”; Poe’s “face was pale and his whole person drenched in perspiration.” At times during his hospitalization, according to most accounts, Poe was calm and lucid. At others he was seized with “a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed.” Eventually, four days after admission, the great author expired.
In 1996, on a lark, a doctor at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore decided to put the case of Poe’s death—stripped of his name and time period—before the center’s weekly pathology rounds. Unaware that the patient in question was Poe, a cardiologist named R. Michael Benitez developed a theory that the most likely cause of death was rabies. As Benitez notes, the attending physician reported no signs of trauma and mentioned none of the extreme fever that one would associate with malaria or yellow fever. Strangest of all was Poe’s cycle of relapsing, between periods of madness and periods of lucidity. The more obvious causes of death, especially the delirium tremens that might present in an alcoholic such as Poe, would have taken an inexorably progressive path, with his condition worsening steadily.
Rabies sufferers, by contrast, are prone to just these sorts of swings between delirium and lucidity. It’s true that Moran made no mention of an animal bite, but as Benitez points out, of the thirty-three human rabies cases in the United States between 1977 and 1994, only nine presented with documented evidence of animal exposure. And the average number of days that neurological rabies sufferers survive is four: exactly the same number of days that elapsed between Poe’s arrival at the hospital and his demise.
By the middle of the century, few physicians believed—as no less a figure than Benjamin Rush could in 1800—that humans sometimes acquired rabies spontaneously, without any contagion at all. But most doctors and veterinarians did still profess this belief about dogs. And to explain this supposed phenomenon, medical opinion had coalesced around a new, rather lurid theory: namely, that many if not most cases of dog rabies were caused by a lack of sexual satisfaction. The rise in pet keeping, in an era before the spay or neuter became common, focused nineteenth-century observers very uncomfortably on the unslaked sexual urges of their otherwise trustworthy companions. Dog owners confronted with the masculine fervor to mount during walks, or with the recurring frenzy of feminine heat, could be forgiven for later imagining that it was these unconsummated passions (and not the unseen nip from a stray in the streets) that had caused their pets to be seized by canine madness.
Henry William Dewhurst, already a figure of murky scientific standing (by the 1840s he would be denounced in medical journals as an incorrigible quack), propounded this theory in a thoroughly dubious 1830 address to the London Veterinary Medical Society. To support his argument that rabies could be spontaneous, he relayed the details of two cases—a terrier confined by an old lady, and a doctor with a sporting hound—in which dogs displayed symptoms of rabies but then recovered. As for his theory that lack of sex was to blame, he fell back on a general observation that when the passion for sex “is unable to be gratified, as was intended by the great Author of nature, pure madness breaks out.” Here his lone example was the story of an elephant, kept in confinement, that had to be put down on account of its “unrestrained fury,” though he neglected even to specify how sex figured into the tale.
Regardless, Dewhurst’s idea gained great purchase in Victorian England, and the French, perhaps predictably, agreed. In her splendid survey of nineteenth-century pet keeping in Paris, The Beast in the Boudoir, the historian Kathleen Kete cites one generally respected text from 1857 that posits sexual frustration as the sole cause of rabies in the dog. (Its authors, the doctors F. J. Bachelet and C. Froussart, lament that dogs do not have the same recourse to self-satisfaction that humans have.) That this theory had found purchase in Italy, too, is evidenced by an 1845 proposal, penned by a certain Monsignor Storti under the title “Project for the Prevention of Hydrophobia in Man,” detailing the creation of what can only be described as mandatory canine bordellos. Under this plan, each male dog would be brought to a central location for his urges to be gratified. Immediately afterward, he would be neutered and then sold. And then—presumably in order to keep these dogs from generating rabies eventually—all male dogs would be destroyed two years after their sale.*
Unlike Bachelet and Froussart, most believers in spontaneous generation did not see sexual frustration as the only cause. Dehydration was another commonly named culprit: because dogs do not sweat, and instead regulate their temperature through panting, medical men of the era thought that intense thirst on hot days could prompt an animal’s blood to fester into a poisonous state. Similarly, it was thought that rabies could results from dogs’ exposure to their own excrement, through contact with it—or, worse, consumption of it.
Regardless of particular theories, this belief in spontaneous generation of rabies had dire effects in the public-health battle over hydrophobia. In 1830, when the British Parliament was crafting a bill to contain the disease, members heard testimony from two noted veterinarians, one of whom believed in spontaneous generation, the other of whom did not. Naturally, these differing beliefs led to two very different prescriptions: the former held that confining dogs would alleviate the epidemic, whereas the latter testified that it would have the opposite effect, generating new cases as confined dogs became “impregnated with an animal poison from the lungs, faeces, urine, and skin.” Similar battles were fought over the mandatory use of muzzles, another effective containment strategy. No consensus could be reached on these legislative issues so long as the science of rabies remained unsettled. And as late as 1874, with Pasteur’s cure only a decade away and the germ theory of disease already percolating through the medical community, a tally of rabies experts surveyed by M. J. Bourrel, the former chief veterinarian of the French army and a staunch contagionist, found that believers in spontaneous generation far outnumbered his own side.
Meanwhile, the burgeoning emphasis on the sexual nature of rabies in the dog coincided with a growing emphasis on the more lurid dimensions of the fatal illness in humans. It was not until the nineteenth century that priapism, satyriasis, and nymphomania in women began to appear in all standard lists of hydrophobia symptoms. Often these mentions were accompanied by a thirdhand anecdote about some man who, like Galen’s porter, was given over to extreme sexual release in his final hours. The most common such tale, about a man who ejaculated thirty times in one day, originated with the eighteenth-century doctor Albrecht von Haller. In the retelling, this became recast as a bravura act of performance—for example, “that rabid man related by Haller, who accomplished the sexual act 30 times in 24 hours”—as if the dying man had wooed a new and willing partner for each. In their book on rabies, Bachelet and Froussart emphasize the weakness of women, too, to these depredations, claiming that a female equivalent of satyriasis (fureur utérine) is apparent in autopsies of rabies victims. They go on to describe nymphomania itself as a related and similarly fatal condition whose path is nearly identical to that of hydrophobia:
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 newly 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?”