It is impossible to overstate how utterly Louis Pasteur, during just two decades of work in the late nineteenth century, remade mankind’s understanding of rabies. His great discovery did not just radically reduce the number of humans dying from hydrophobia in the West each year. Through his invention of a preventative rabies vaccine for dogs, he also significantly reduced the incidence of the disease in the animal most responsible for spreading it. Moreover, during the course of the twentieth century, Pasteur’s treatment for humans was improved and refined. Growing the vaccine in duck embryos (and later in cell cultures), rather than in rabbits, simplified the process and standardized the product. Researchers eventually discovered that supplementing the postexposure vaccine with rabies immunoglobulin, derived from the blood plasma of already-vaccinated humans, would markedly improve the success rate. As death from rabies declined in the West, the disease came to exist in the public consciousness largely as an archaic holdover from an earlier age: seldom seen, nearly mythical. Not only did rabies cease to be a meaningful cause of death in industrialized countries; it became largely absent from the streets and lanes. No longer did rabies threaten to invade the home, to colonize the trusted creature sleeping at the hearth.
At the same time, though, even as the oldest animal infection receded as a public menace, the pioneering work of microbiologists was establishing that a whole host of other diseases were, in fact, linked to similar diseases in beasts. This includes, of course, the titan of them all, the bubonic plague. (The flea-borne pathogen that Alexandre Yersin isolated in 1894 was later renamed in his honor—Yersinia pestis—and in 2010, using skeletons from plague pits, it was proved beyond doubt that this pathogen had been the cause of the Black Death.) All of human history prior to the twentieth century had been haunted by rabies as an unforestallable and invariably fatal infection from animals. In the twentieth century, as rabies receded, it was replaced by a rapid succession of equally horrific and, in many cases, far more dangerous zoonoses.
The most fatal of these struck like a tsunami between 1917 and 1920, when some 50 to 100 million people worldwide—roughly 3 percent of the global population—died of a particularly nasty strain of influenza, the so-called Spanish flu. At the time, medicine believed influenza to be a uniquely human malady. But throughout 1918, during the height of the epidemic, reports trickled in about uncommon animal ailments that seemed to mirror the symptoms of flu. At a veterinary hospital of the French army, a shocking number of horses had been laid low with such a syndrome. In South Africa and Madagascar, it was primates, baboons, and monkeys felled by the hundreds; in northern Ontario it was moose, dead in the brush. But most ravaged of all was the Iowan pig. First noted at the Cedar Rapids Swine Show in the fall of 1918, flu-like symptoms spread over the succeeding months to literally millions of hogs. The veterinarian J. S. Koen, who tracked the disease while in the employ of the federal Bureau of Animal Industry, reported its toll in stark terms. “Sudden and severe onslaught. Patient very sick and distressed…. Muscular soreness, nervous and excitable. Congestion of eyes. Watery discharge from eyes and nostrils…. Temperatures usually high, many instances up to 108°F. Rapid loss of flesh, may lose as much as five pounds per day. Extreme physical weakness. Very rapid progress through herd. Lasts four or five days and patient begins to recover about the time death is expected.” But recovery never arrived for the thousands of pigs, or roughly 1 to 2 percent of cases, that perished from the infection.
Just calling this pig malady a “flu” was enough to invite skepticism from scientists and hand-wringing from the pork industry, which worried that reports of a deadly human flu in pigs could turn the public stomach against its products. But Koen stood his ground. “I believe I have as much to support this diagnosis in pigs as the physicians have to support a similar diagnosis in man,” he wrote, and went on:
The similarity of the epidemic among people and the epizootic among pigs was so close, the reports so frequent, that an outbreak in the family would be followed immediately by an outbreak among the hogs, and vice versa, as to present a most striking coincidence if not suggesting a close relation between the two conditions. It looked like “flu,” it presented the identical symptoms of “flu,” it terminated like “flu,” and until proved it was not “flu,” I shall stand by that diagnosis.
It was, as the historian Alfred W. Crosby later wrote, “a peroration…worthy of Luther standing before the Emperor at Worms.”
Over the course of the next twenty years, four scientists working on both sides of the Atlantic—Richard Shope, based in Princeton, New Jersey, at the laboratories of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and a team of three in the United Kingdom (Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrewes, and Patrick Laidlaw)—endeavored to prove Koen’s intemperate assertion correct. In 1928, Shope was back in his home state of Iowa investigating so-called hog cholera (in fact, unrelated to the human virus of that name) when he started looking into Koen’s theory. The following fall, when the swine infection hit the herds again in full force, Shope returned to collect tissue samples and mucus secretions, and by 1931 he and his mentor, Paul Lewis, had isolated what would later be confirmed as the swine flu virus.
Meanwhile, the three English scientists, also at work on the problem of flu, employed a domesticated animal that until then had stayed on the sidelines of the quandary: namely, the ferret. In the mid-1920s, Laidlaw had coauthored some pathbreaking research on distemper, a nasty respiratory illness in dogs that he and his collaborator demonstrated could easily be spread to ferrets. Now he and his collaborators on flu were attempting to pass the human strain of the disease to ferrets. In 1933 they succeeded, isolating a virus from diseased humans that created a comparable illness in twenty-six ferrets. Perhaps more important, they also demonstrated that Pfeiffer’s bacillus, a bacterium that for decades had been suspected as the cause of influenza, had no effect at all.
That same year Shope, with whom the three were now working in excited collaboration, used his swine virus to produce flu in ferrets. And this was not just any flu; it was a horrific, Spanish-style flu, characterized by the same bloody pneumonia that had swept away millions in the global pandemic. By May 1935, in a lecture at St. John’s College, Laidlaw was able to state confidently his opinion—one borne out by all subsequent discoveries—that “the virus of swine influenza is really the virus of the great pandemic of 1918 adapted to the pig and persisting in that species ever since.”
This retrospective understanding of the 1918 pandemic was just the first such awakening in a century replete with terrifying zoonoses. U.S. soldiers returned from the Korean War with a sinister strain of hantavirus, a nasty hemorrhagic fever acquired from rats. In the late 1960s, Africans were falling ill from Lassa fever, also the handiwork of rats. The 1980s saw the emergence not just of AIDS but of the terrifying Ebola, also a disease from monkeys that, at its most acute, can induce terrible death involving bleeding from all bodily orifices. More recently, two strains of animal influenza—the onset of the avian flu and the robust return of the swine flu—killed thousands of people and prompted thousands more to hide for months behind surgical masks. Despite the slow ebb of rabies as a killer of men, the preceding century nevertheless supplied humans with countless reasons to eye their animal neighbors warily.
By the 1930s, rabies in America had largely subsided in humans, though their dogs were a different matter. This was especially the case in the South; a report from late in that decade put the infection rate among the dogs of Birmingham, Alabama, at 1 percent—a shocking number for a virus that kills all of its canine hosts. Though the canine vaccine was by then widely available, whites in the region vaccinated just 40 percent of their dogs, and African Americans only one in ten. The human death rate had been brought low but remained real: more than 250 deaths were logged in the American South during the 1930s, a per capita rate not dissimilar to the pre-Pasteur hysterias in eighteenth-century England.
That decade also saw the publication of a seminal novel, one of the most important of the twentieth century, whose denouement hinges on a spectacular demise in the jaws of rabies. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, details the life and romantic entanglements of Janie Crawford, a black woman from a modest upbringing in western Florida. After being raised by her grandmother, a former slave, Janie marries a much older farmer; is seduced away from him by a soon-to-be politician and entrepreneur; then finally (after the death of this brutal and abusive second husband) falls in love with a much younger man named Vergible Woods, known to all as Tea Cake, whose fraught and tempestuous marriage to Janie consumes the second half of the book. The pair move first to Jacksonville and then to the Everglades, where they live happily in a shack, planting and picking beans by day and socializing at night, as Tea Cake entertains guests with his guitar and then takes their money (or vice versa) in dice games.
Their reverie is eventually shattered by the arrival of a hurricane, the ravages of which on their little shack prove to be the least of their troubles. Far more consequential, though neither is aware of this at the time, is the bite that Tea Cake receives—on his face, no less—from a shivering, furious dog they encounter while fleeing to safety. Perched improbably on the back of an almost wholly submerged cow, the dog “growled like a lion,” with “stiff-standing hackles, stiff muscles, teeth uncovered as he lashed up his fury for the charge.” Tea Cake wrestles with the dog and eventually drowns it, but not before it has clamped its slavering jaws upon his cheekbone.
Three weeks later, after the pair has fixed up a house in the Everglades and (they believe) resumed their life together, Tea Cake starts to complain of a headache. In the dead of night he wakes up in a “nightmarish struggle with an enemy that was at his throat.” The next morning, offered a glass of water, Tea Cake gags on it, dashes the glass to the floor. “Dat water is somethin’ wrong wid it,” he exclaims. “It nelly choke me tuh death.”
A doctor, summoned to Tea Cake’s bedside, warns Janie that rabies is the likely diagnosis. The only thing she can do now is to leave him at the County Hospital, where the staff can “tie him down and look after him.”
“But he don’t like no hospital at all,” Janie replies. “He’d think Ah wuz tired uh doin’ fuh ’im, when God knows Ah ain’t. Ah can’t stand de idea us tyin’ Tea Cake lak he wuz uh mad dawg.”
“It almost amounts to dat,” says the doctor, forebodingly. “He’s got almost no chance to pull through and he’s liable to bite somebody else, specially you, and then you’ll be in the same fix he’s in.”
By the very next morning, Tea Cake has descended into a paranoid fury. Seized with suspicions of his wife, he returns from the outhouse and draws his pistol on her. She has prepared herself for this turn with a rifle. She plants a fatal shot in Tea Cake just as he lunges and bites her on the arm. She is forced to pry her slain husband’s jaws from her own flesh.
Given the doctor’s explicit warning, we are left to wonder: Has Janie herself contracted rabies from Tea Cake’s bite? Today’s rabies experts believe that the virus is unlikely to be passed from human to human via biting. But as the Hurston scholar Robert Haas points out, that possibility was often emphasized by doctors in Hurston’s time, and the doctor in her own book raises it. If Janie has been infected, we aren’t given any sense that a similar madness is settling on her. And yet it’s impossible to tell whether the window for infection has passed. The book both begins and ends at some unspecified time after the incident, when Janie returns to the town (Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s own hometown) where she and her second husband had lived and prospered. At her trial for Tea Cake’s death—before, in a heavy irony, Janie is acquitted by an all-white jury that simply doesn’t believe killing a black man to be a crime—the doctor testifies to finding her “all bit in the arm, sitting on the floor and petting Tea Cake’s head.” Probably we are supposed to conclude, somewhat reasonably, that he treated Janie then for her possible exposure.
The other lingering question, of course, is how Hurston came to use rabies as a plot point in the first place. Critics and biographers have found the choice somewhat bewildering. Robert Haas points out that Hurston’s brother and first husband were both doctors, and her family had seven hounds while she was growing up; either of these might have lodged rabies in her brain, as it were.
But he also offers up a more intriguing and ultimately more plausible theory. At the beginning of 1936, as Hurston was writing her novel, a surprisingly popular movie about science played on screens all across the country. Its title? The Story of Louis Pasteur. Based on its gross of $665,000, Haas estimates that thirteen million Americans, or a full tenth of the population, would have seen the film—the entire last half of which is devoted to Pasteur’s formulation of the rabies vaccine. In New York, where Hurston was living at the time, it ran for the whole month of February and also received reviews in the daily papers. It’s only circumstantial evidence, to be sure; but we take a strange pleasure in the thought that the great Pasteur, while alleviating the terror of rabies in the streets, at the same time helped to inject a dollop of that terror into one of the century’s great works of fiction.
It was also during the mid-1930s that the man who would revolutionize our ideas of the undead got his first taste of big-screen terror. The movie was Werewolf of London, and Richard Matheson was nine. “Somehow, I talked my mother into taking me,” he recalled. “And when Henry Hull”—who in the film played a biologist, Wilfred Glendon, bitten by a strange animal while conducting research in Tibet—“changed into a werewolf, I freaked! Fell out of my seat and crawled up the aisle.” The son of Norwegian immigrants, Matheson grew up in Brooklyn and excelled at science and music during high school, at the city’s prestigious Brooklyn Tech. But after seeing combat in World War II and then graduating from the University of Missouri, he charted an entirely different course as a writer. He began with short stories in various genres—sci-fi, mystery, western—and then moved on to novels. To pay the bills, he worked days at the post office and later at an aircraft plant. At the time of his marriage, he had made only five hundred dollars from writing. “Those were very bad years,” he later recalled, during which time his financial anxieties began to play into his fiction: “My theme in those years was of a man, isolated and alone, and assaulted on all sides by everything you could imagine.”
In 1953, Matheson turned this trope into what is probably the most influential horror novel of the twentieth century. I Am Legend tracks the lonely existence of Robert Neville, who apparently stands as the only human survivor of a terrible virus that has killed off most of the people and turned the remainder into vampires. But these vampires are far from the becloaked aristocrats who haunted the dreams of the nineteenth century. They are insensate monsters who sleep all day in their lightless hovels and then roam at night in search of fresh blood. Immune to the virus, Neville becomes desperate in his loneliness, brought to the brink of self-destruction by the psychological ravages of his ceaseless routine: his home must be constantly fortified, and supplies replenished, in order to withstand the nightly onslaught. During the daylight hours he also drives around his city, a postapocalyptic Los Angeles, breezing down its abandoned avenues to stake as many vampires as he can find.
The slightest slip in this routine can lead to terrible consequences. One day, while making his rounds, Neville realizes that his watch has stopped; dusk is near, and he is at least an hour from home. At the intersection of Western and Compton he begins to see the vampires, rushing out of buildings as his station wagon passes. By the time he reaches his house, a mob of them await in front. He careers straight into the crowd, watching them fall like bowling pins, their pale, contorted faces crying out in agony. He heads past his house, and the remaining vampires make chase behind him, allowing him to dart around the block, park in front of his house, and dash to his door before they catch up.
We never learn the precise nature of the virus, though we do know that it afflicts dogs as well as people. Indeed, Matheson’s description of a dog, dying in its agonies, gives us a sense that it bears an acute resemblance to rabies. Neville is amazed to see a live dog walking around, and so he begins to feed it. Soon, though, the dog succumbs: its expression begins to glaze, its tongue lolls out. Neville reaches for it, and its lips pull back in a threatening grimace. It begins to violently shake, with “guttural snarls bubbling in its throat.” The dog dies a week later.
With I Am Legend’s evocation of a pandemic, and its intimations of nuclear devastation—World War III, we discover, has recently transpired, possibly helping to create the virus—the novel somehow managed to take the moribund vampire genre, still ruled even then by dour gothic Slavs in musty castles, and to reinvent it for the cold war era. One of Matheson’s prime innovations was its setting: contemporary, suburban. But even more revolutionary was the nature of his “vampires.” Far from the sophisticated loners of vampire literature to date, this was a mob of undead creatures whose threat lay not in their cunning but in their animal ferocity and, most important, their sheer numbers. “He was going out and staking vampires every day, finding them at the cold counter at Stop and Shop, laid out like lamb chops or something,” Stephen King once said, in citing Matheson’s book as a tremendous influence on his own work. “I realized then that horror didn’t have to happen in a haunted castle; it could happen in the suburbs, on your street, maybe right next door.”
Although I Am Legend calls its ghouls “vampires,” the book actually was instrumental in jump-starting an entirely different genre: the zombie tale. The term “zombie” derives from Haitian religious belief and has been appropriated by American fiction authors since at least the late 1920s; Hollywood began making zombie movies in the 1930s. But in the mid-1960s, Matheson’s story inspired George Romero, then a TV-ad director in Pittsburgh, to conceive of a more vital sort of zombie. In a short story that he eventually called “Anubis” (though never published), Romero “basically ripped off” Matheson’s vision in describing a dystopian world where the dead have come back to life. Eventually, chafed by the constraints of television and unable to get funding for a feature, Romero and his friends decided to fund themselves in bringing his story to life. They pooled six hundred dollars apiece, from ten of them; a few of the other producers took roles in the film, the rest all pitched in as miscellaneous crew, and Romero directed. The result was a low-budget masterpiece called Night of the Living Dead, which grossed millions as a cult classic and also set the template for all zombie movies that would follow. Like the “vampires” in Matheson’s story, Romero’s zombie undead were not individual malefactors, not some garden-variety Draculas or wolf-men. They were an insatiable horde, eating their way through a society where all order has broken down. Zombies became synonymous with apocalypse.
The zombie-apocalypse genre has seen a particular resurgence in the twenty-first century. A 2004 remake of Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, became a top grosser in both senses. Romero himself came off the bench to make the fourth film in his series, called Land of the Dead. A brilliant British spoof film, Shaun of the Dead, revolves around two London buddies whose instinct amid a zombie onslaught is to fight their way to their favorite pub. In books, Max Brooks’s tongue-in-decaying-cheek primer, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, became a bestseller in 2003, and Brooks penned an even more successful follow-up novel called World War Z; meanwhile, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a version of the Jane Austen novel with flesh-eating “unmentionables” woven in at opportune moments throughout, shot up bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. One graphic novel series, called The Walking Dead, has been turned into a popular TV show.
The New York Times has called zombies—in its Sunday Styles section, of all places—“the post-millennial ghoul of the moment.” The question is, why? One theory is that the September 11 attacks took a peculiar psychic toll, leaving Anglophones with apocalypse on the brain. The sci-fi blog io9.com made a chart that purported to show zombies gained popularity during periods of social unrest. But its historical choices seemed fatally selective; for example, a long zombie dearth between 1943 and 1959 seems hard to square with this theory, given that Hiroshima and the rise of the cold war were two giant causes for apocalyptic musing if ever there were any. Another notion, which made the rounds during the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, was that zombie booms correlated with Republican rule. Romero, after all, had reinvented the genre in the early days of Nixon, and then the Reagan administration ushered in a new wave that included Re-animator and The Evil Dead. In Democratic-leaning times, when (so the theory ran) popular rhetoric tends to demonize bloodsucking plutocrats, the Byronic vampire will find himself ascendant; in conservative periods, by contrast, the fear is heaped on mobs of shadowy masses—whether they be criminals or welfare recipients or Muslims—and so zombies naturally rise again to become the undead bugbear of choice. This theory, too, fails to convince: although Obama’s tenure has seen the rise of Twilight, the squishy tween vampire sensation, zombies have shown no signs of returning to their graves.
Before we can really parse the zombie wherefores, we need to recognize that there has not been just one zombie boom; there have been two concurrent ones, representing two very different visions of what a zombie can be. The first, and probably the most authentic to the Haitian origins of the term, is the slow zombie: the plodding, brainless variety, easily fought off one-on-one with a shovel to the head, or even a nice firm push to the torso. What makes the slow zombies dangerous is their sheer numbers and the relentlessness of their assault, day after day.* Slow zombies tend to also be more explicitly undead, in some cases even rising from graves, as in Romero’s first film. Really, one should think of slow zombies as the true descendants of Arnod Paole, the ur-vampire observed by Johannes Flückinger in Visum et repertum: a creature devoid of cunning or fury, just a dead body walking the earth in a state of semi-decay.
But the fast zombie—well, that is a different beast entirely. These are more often than not the infected zombies, creatures of a fictional universe where a mysterious virus has descended on the population, spreading through bites and causing its human victims to become snarling, rapacious devourers of manflesh. Their means of murder is debased, to be sure, but their frenzy is not terribly far removed from the ancient lyssa, or wolfish rage, that spurred Heracles to slay his family or that swept Hector along to both glory and folly during the Trojan War. The fast zombie is a man (or woman) made into an insensate, murderous animal. The paragon of the fast zombie film, and almost certainly the best zombie film of the past decade, is 28 Days Later, in which a virus called “rage” spreads through society. The film’s director, Danny Boyle, says he was specifically inspired by rabies, because it creates not just animal aggression in its victims but also an awareness, a mortal discomfort, as well as the physical horrors of hydrophobia. “We wanted the zombies to be bloodthirsty,” Boyle says, “but completely full of fear themselves.” In his desire to portray the agony of the zombie, he harks back to the legacy of Poe, carried down from Ovid, of horror tales forcing us to imagine the awful transformation affecting ourselves.
The most recent film adaptation of I Am Legend—the only to retain the original title—was another fast zombie affair, though not quite as effective as Boyle’s lean masterpiece. As in the book, it’s a disease that afflicts the monsters—they are pointedly not called vampires—though its particulars are roughly as convoluted as in the book; in the film’s case, it’s a modified version of measles, an engineered virus that cured cancer, on the plus side, but then unfortunately mutated to turn everybody into bloodthirsty ghouls. To see the transformation wrought in Neville’s dog, though, makes the parallel to rabies even more explicit. In the film’s telling, Neville (played by Will Smith) has a dog, Samantha, all along, and indeed Sam serves as his only companion for his daylight rovings and experimentations. When Sam gets bitten by an infected dog, and Neville is unsuccessful in saving her through serum, he sits on the floor of his lab embracing her while he waits to see what will transpire. Soon he gets his answer. Her pupils dilate; her teeth stretch into fangs; she begins to growl at her master. At the moment she lunges for his face, he regretfully converts his embrace into a choke hold; the most moving shot of the film is Neville’s teary face as he strangles the life out of his one remaining friend.
To be clear: the fast zombie is not a rabid zombie, per se. These films are not in any sense about rabies, or about the fear of rabies; or, rather, if they are, it’s only in the sense that the endorphins we feel on the treadmill are “about” the predator (not) nipping at our Nikes. A hundred years have passed since Americans have died from rabies in any meaningful number. And yet the basic trope of the fast zombie tale—the viral force that cuts out a soul, leaving a ravaging animal behind—has rabies woven deep into its DNA. Shielded from the disease, we nevertheless cannot wholly free ourselves from the fear.
The same year that Richard Matheson made the vampire more metaphorically rabid, the true rabidity of the vampire’s animal sidekick became more widely appreciated. Late one summer morning in 1953, a seven-year-old boy on a Florida cattle ranch, in the shrubby pine flatwoods of Hillsborough County, near Tampa, was out searching for a lost ball when a depraved creature emerged from some bushes. It was a yellow bat—a species that eats nothing but insects—but today it seemed determined to make a meal of the boy. It latched on to his chest, holding fast even as he ran screaming to his mother. She knocked the bat to the ground, and the boy’s father killed it. As he comforted his son, he remembered something he had read in a cattlemen’s magazine, about how cows in Central America were catching rabies from vampire bat bites. He called up the local health authorities and insisted that they test the bat’s carcass for the deadly disease.
For centuries, rabies had been known to scientists and citizens alike as a malady of the dog. Yes, the experts allowed, this disease could also manifest in other four-legged creatures: wolves and foxes, skunks and cattle. But when it came to bats—which harbor rabies far more frequently, and in a far more stable way, than any other species—science was shockingly slow to recognize the truth. Stretching back to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, observers have reported the bites of vampire bats to be “poisonous.” Cattle in Central and South America are under constant assault from vampiros, and on rare occasions, often after a daytime attack, fully half of a cow herd would die from a terrible paralysis. Beginning in 1906, ranches in southern Brazil were decimated by a condition that came to be called peste das cadeiras, or the “plague of chairs”—so named because the hindquarters of the animals were being immobilized, forcing them into an unusual sitting pose. The cattle also salivated excessively, had difficulty swallowing. As the paralysis slowly ascended, the animals became emaciated and finally died of respiratory failure. By 1908, more than four thousand head of cattle and one thousand horses had succumbed to this inexplicable disease.
In 1911, a São Paulo laboratory had a breakthrough: on the basis of characteristic spots, called Negri bodies, microscopically visible in brain tissue from fallen animals, it identified rabies as the culprit. And yet—even though vampire bats had commonly been seen biting affected herds in the unusual circumstance of broad daylight—the scientific community in Brazil was convinced that unseen dogs must be to blame. A major turning point came in 1916, when an epidemiological study pointed to vampire bats as the cause. That same year, rabies was positively diagnosed in a fruit bat. After hundreds of years of bat-borne rabies deaths in cattle, veterinarians and health officials slowly came to realize that peste das cadeiras, along with similarly ruinous livestock mortality events in Central and South America (tumbi baba in Paraguay, rabia paresiante in Argentina, renguera in Costa Rica, derriengue in Central America, tronchado in Mexico), was a devastation brought by aerial assault.
The first human deaths attributed to rabies spread by vampire bats occurred in Trinidad in 1929. Since dog rabies had been eliminated from the island in 1918, scientists were able to quickly and correctly assign the role of vector to the bat. In the three decades that followed, eighty-nine humans and thousands of domestic animals died from vampire bat rabies in Trinidad. But outside of Trinidad, it wasn’t until the early 1950s that human deaths from vampire bat rabies were recognized. In 1951, a Mexican man, prior to succumbing to what would eventually be confirmed as rabies, told his doctors that four weeks prior he had suffered a penetrating bite while defending his children from an unusually aggressive vampire bat. Subsequent investigation by health officials revealed that in the man’s home village of Platanito, four children had died of paralytic neurological disease since being bitten by the same bat.
By June 1953, when the life of the seven-year-old Florida boy was at stake after a daylight attack by a yellow bat, the prevalence of rabies in vampire bats was widely known. But North American bat species, of which the vast majority are insectivorous, were thought to be safe. Luckily, the boy’s father was able to prevail upon health officials to perform the test. Within hours, W. R. Hoffert, a senior bacteriologist in the Tampa regional laboratory, saw the telltale Negri bodies in the bat’s brain, a finding confirmed by further investigation at the Florida Board of Health in Jacksonville. The boy was given the postexposure vaccine, and he never came down with the disease.
News of this case prompted far more vigilant surveillance of rabies in American bats. By the end of 1965, infected bats had been identified in all states except Rhode Island, Alaska, and Hawaii; today, only Hawaii’s bats are rabies-free. Bat bites are now the cause of nearly all human rabies infections in the United States, accounting for thirty-two out of thirty-three deaths from domestic exposure since 1990. Why is this so? Bat bites are so subtle that people can be infected without their being aware of it, especially in the night, when a bat bite is sometimes not even painful enough to wake a sleeping human. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that anyone who awakens with a bat in his or her room seek out vaccination for rabies. Likewise, any unattended child or mentally incapacitated person found in the presence of a bat should be treated as though he or she were exposed. By foot, rabies may strike with snarling fury, but by air it arrives with the silent efficiency of an assassin.
Epidemics are always fraught with moral overtones, but never so much as in the case of AIDS, whose earliest populations of victims—gay men and intravenous drug users—were also among the most marginalized groups in Western culture. That the disease would also prove to be animal in origin, with all the cultural baggage that saddles such zoonotic infections, was unfortunate but unavoidable. What is more surprising is how many different animal suspects were considered before the right one was ID’d. In a letter to the Lancet in 1983, a Harvard researcher named Jane Teas published a brief letter fingering the pig, of all creatures: the first known Haitian cases (1978) of the syndrome, she pointed out, were followed soon afterward by a large-scale outbreak of African swine fever, a high-fatality infection in pigs that, like AIDS, affects the lymphatic system and weakens its hosts against other, opportunistic infections. Around the same time, the family pets, too, came into play. Media reports noted the similarity of AIDS to feline leukemia (which it resembles only somewhat) and canine distemper, or parvovirus (which it resembles hardly at all). Thus did the most terrifying illness of the twentieth century, a disease that changed an entire generation’s consciousness about sexual behavior, begin with an uncommonly large menagerie of nonhuman perpetrators.
Speculation soon came to rest for good on the monkey. In late 1984, a research team at Harvard isolated a retrovirus from the blood of captive macaques that were suffering from AIDS-like symptoms. Unable to find a comparable virus in wild macaques, the scientists theorized that the macaques had caught the disease in captivity from a green monkey—whose wild brethren did, in fact, harbor a similar retrovirus. This “green monkey” theory catapulted into the public imagination, especially as the scientists began to outdo one another in their explicit theories for how the cross-infection transpired. A short June 1987 letter to the Lancet cited a 1973 anthropology paper reporting that the Congolese, in order to whip themselves into “intense sexual activity,” injected monkey blood (from the corresponding gender of monkey, naturally) into their genital regions, as well as into their thighs and backs. The following month Abraham Karpas, a British AIDS researcher at the University of Cambridge, blew up this lurid just-so story into a full-page speculation in the New Scientist.
For more than a decade following that report, urban legends about the animal origins of AIDS abounded.* Much of what made AIDS so hysteria-inducing, of course, was the combination of its fatality rate (90 percent, in cases where infection with HIV progressed to the full-fledged syndrome) with the sexual mode of its transmission. It made a certain sick sense that such a beastly disease might be bestial in origin—might originate, that is, in bestiality. Anyone who grew up in late-1980s America, as we did, can attest to the variety and range of nonsense that circulated among adolescents of the time. But a similar set of stories swirled across most of the Western world. One AIDS researcher interviewed teens in her native Newfoundland and got responses like this:
It originally came from Africa where they have the ritual practice of natives having sex with apes.
And this:
The first one I heard was about a sailor whose ship stopped over in Africa and the sailor had intercourse with a baboon. The second story apparently happened in South America—Cuba, I think, or in Mexico. A man had intercourse with his sheep.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, a focus group convened by AIDS opinion researchers in 1990 yielded up this classic exchange of etiologic theorizing:
A: I heard it was a guy had a thing with a gorilla.
B: I heard it was a guy had sex with a bull.
C: I heard it was a guy in Africa or something.
A: It was just because of those black motherfuckers from abroad, man.
C: Had sex with a gorilla or a monkey, something like that anyway. That’s the way I saw it was the pakis that brought it here.
Note the way that each of these two groups, besides mentioning Africa, also fixate on the foreigners closer to hand. The Scots rail at the “pakis” (a slur that, having begun as shorthand for “Pakistanis,” quickly evolved to encompass all Muslim immigrants to the United Kingdom), while the Newfies, for whom immigrants, let alone dark-skinned ones, are an uncommon sight, look nearer askance to Cuba or Mexico. One is reminded acutely of those dog-headed men whom the medieval cartographers sketched around the margins—but only in the lands far away from themselves.
Indeed, as one might expect, the residents of Latin America and Africa, including those most at risk for AIDS, see matters differently. In 1990, an AIDS researcher in Punta Gorda on the coast of Belize recorded this exchange between two women in a bar:
Woman bar owner: That thing [AIDS] has been here since the beginning of time. It come from dogs, American women up there having sex with dogs, they catch it from them. Dogs. Here you don’t let dogs in the house, they stay outside, cats too.
Woman farmer: I heard it comes from those people in Africa who go to the forest and do things with monkeys. Those monkeys have it and give it to the people.
Woman bar owner (roaring with laughter): A woman up there had sex with a dog and she gave it to her man. That’s how it got started!
Even in Africa, undeniably the birthplace of the human virus, locals have an origin myth for AIDS that involves sex with a dog. In their version, which has circulated in Uganda, Kenya, Mali, and elsewhere in west Africa, it is in fact an African woman who has sex with the dog—but only because a white man paid her to do it. In Zimbabwe, the priest and anthropologist Alexander Rödlach traced this myth back to a 1991 story in Harare’s Sunday Mail called “Inhuman Sex Acts: Women Arrested.” Local police, the article claimed, “have confirmed the arrest of some women in Harare who were allegedly indulging in sex with a dog in exchange for money.” The dog’s owner, “believed to be a white man,” would tape a video at each session, with the intention of selling the videos to pornographic markets “overseas.” The paper quoted a supposed ex-boyfriend of one of the participants, who had confessed to him about her canine dalliances. What prompted her to come clean? He had confronted her about “why a venereal disease I had contracted had taken four months to heal.” The former boyfriend is unnamed, of course; indeed, no sources are named anywhere in the article. AIDS is not mentioned, either.
More than a decade later, however, when Rödlach conducted wide-ranging interviews with Zimbabweans about the origins of AIDS, this dog story still came up frequently. Those who cited it usually did not believe that the infection had been in any way accidental. Instead, the white man had invented HIV, infected the dog with it, and then specifically recruited the black women in order to pass the disease on to them. Folk narratives of disease in Africa often blame some sort of “sorcery,” and in this case it was a sorcery with a particularly twenty-first-century narrative, involving as it did an evil, virus-inventing scientist and an international pornography market. (In some African countries, the white man in the narrative has become a “European development expert.”) And yet the core of the story is primal as well as universal, traded from Africa to Belize to Scotland to Newfoundland to the United States. Even in an era when science can illuminate the mysteries of disease at the finest molecular scale, we retain a deep-seated sense that an unnaturally virulent disease must have its origins in the most unnatural of couplings: the commingling of the human and the animal.
On May 6, 1994, when the Channel Tunnel began carrying rail traffic between the United Kingdom and France, the proximate terror in the minds of the British people was not about economic collapse or invading armies or even marauding tourists. It was about rabies. The disease had been eradicated entirely from Britain in 1902, and notwithstanding a few animal scares over the years, usually involving dogs brought in from mainland Europe, rabies had never again found a foothold on British soil. Just before the tunnel opened, one poll found that two-fifths of those who objected to the tunnel did so because it would make it “easy to bring rabies into the country”; in an earlier survey, carried out by a local paper in Folkestone, Kent, just near the tunnel’s mouth, some 88 percent of respondents believed the Chunnel would render rabies “virtually unstoppable” or at least greatly increase its incidence. It is difficult to overstate just how large rabies loomed in the minds of the Kentish in particular. When interviewed by the Australian academic Eve Darian-Smith, an Anglican clergyman in Kent put it in the starkest possible terms. “The Channel Tunnel is a violation of our island integrity—a rape,” he said. “Building it was a triumph of power and money over ordinary people and the English countryside. People think it might give us rabies in the same way as a rape victim might catch AIDS.”
As not a few commentators suggested during the Chunnel dustup, the eradication of rabies at the century’s beginning seemed if anything to have increased British terror of the disease in the subsequent decades. Rabies came to stand in for all manner of foreign ills; “the blessing of insularity,” one member of Parliament remarked in 1990, “has long protected us against rabid dogs and dictators alike.” And it did not help matters that an unscrupulous press had often preyed upon rabies fears in canny ways. This was particularly true during the mid-1970s, when a nasty outbreak of fox rabies in France made headlines across Britain. In the midst of the scare, Larry Lamb, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the Sun, bought for serialization a work of fiction called Rabid, which he retitled Day of the Mad Dogs. He had the first installment illustrated with the head of a rabid dog, foam running from its enormous jaws right down the page of the paper.
More shocking still, the paper produced a television commercial to promote the series, hiring as its canine stars the very same dogs that had appeared in the renowned horror film The Omen. “The commercial began sedately,” Lamb later recalled. A middle-aged couple sits relaxing in the drawing room of an elegant country home. All of a sudden, the couple’s two dogs pounce on them, slavering. “We showed close-ups of the dogs’ foaming mouths”—achieved with shaving cream, Lamb said proudly—“and bloodied victims.” This touched off a montage of horrors, including screaming babies and hunters out looking for mad dogs, before ending with a scene of the “expiring victim, sweating and moaning in hospital.” The spot was so horrifying that by 11:00 p.m. on the very day it first ran, it was ordered off the air by broadcasting regulators.
Needless to say, Day of the Mad Dogs, both in serialization and then as a stand-alone novel, was a runaway success. Its terrible chain of events is set in motion by John and Paula, a young married couple who vacation in France soon after the death of their beloved dog. While staying in a villa just outside Cassis, the pair meets a bedraggled but affectionate stray, and Paula decides that they simply must bring it home. John is initially reluctant, but as he starts to come around, he finds that Paula, disinterested in sex ever since the previous dog died, notably warms to him again (“He began to wonder when he had last felt her nipple so erect”). Paula refuses to allow the new dog, which they name Asp, to get stuck in that nasty old British pet quarantine. Six months, she points out, is equivalent to “five years or more” for Asp; apparently, British dog years outpace American ones like the pound against the dollar. So the pair recruit John’s rakish school chum Peter—with whom he once shared “a record unbroken stand for the first wicket against Lancing”—to smuggle Asp across the Channel in his yacht.
The outcome is as expected: once ensconced in their town of Abbotsfield, Asp goes mad. Soon the bodies, canine and human, begin to pile up. At the novel’s end, with more than ten people (including Paula) dead and a good fraction of Britain’s pets exterminated wholesale, the townsfolk of Abbotsfield abduct John from his home and lock him in a dungeon with a rabid dog. Not until he is suffering through the final agonies of the disease do they haul him up from the prison, return him to his home, and set it ablaze with him inside.
The same year Day of the Mad Dogs appeared—1977—another pulp thriller about rabies, The Rage, hit British shelves.* Patriotic themes that in the former book merely hector the reader reappear in the latter to beat him about the head. In this story, it is Emma, ten-year-old daughter of the corrupt civil servant Lambert Diggery, who sneaks back an adorable dog she meets in the Ardennes, on a vacation where British declinism hangs morosely in the air. (The lass, after asking her father about the balance-of-trade deficit, sighs with innocent wisdom: “It’s no way to run a country, is it?”) Once smuggled into Mother England, the dog bites Emma’s horse, which later rears up mad while the girl is riding it in a picturesque gymkhana. Next, the dog bites Emma herself, who, in the final throes of her own madness, will (in an echo of Tea Cake) chomp down on her own mother’s neck. Finally the dog bites two foxes, the necessary narrative device by which to infect the hounds during a classic English hunt. As if this whole tableau were not isolationist enough, we learn along the way that Lambert Diggery is so besotted with the affections of Monique, a prostitute in Brussels—yes, he serves as a representative to the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the EU—that he has been helping her sinister confederates move heroin onto British soil.
As in Day of the Mad Dogs, the imagined outbreak of The Rage could be easily controlled, were it not for a terribly implausible series of coincidences. One intrepid reporter locates the initial dog’s corpse, but while driving to deliver the remains to his boss for testing, the young man crashes his car and is consumed, along with the evidence, in the ensuing fireball. Later the boss finds another rabid dog and locks it in his trunk, but when he is pulled over for reckless driving, the police open the trunk and allow the pooch to escape.
However ridiculous both novels may be, they do shed light on an essential problem of island eradication. Their plots hinge on the notion that authorities in both medicine and government, so sure that rabies cannot be a problem in Britain, will turn a blind eye to clear signs that the disease has returned. (Depressingly, this problem is far from fictional, as Chapter 8—about attempts to control a rabies outbreak on Bali, a previously rabies-free island—will make clear.)
So perhaps it is not surprising how keenly rabies figured, nearly two decades later, in the campaign against the Channel Tunnel. Opponents were little dissuaded by the argument that the length of the tunnel—some thirty-five miles long, with no source of food—would confound any four-footed migrants. These opponents were only partly mollified by the elaborate set of defenses that the tunnel’s architects put in place after the outcry: security fences with animal-proof mesh, twenty-four-hour animal surveillance, and electrified barriers—“stun mats” was the more colorful term invoked—inside the tunnel. Soon before the tunnel opened, its PR handlers revealed to the media that a French fox had tested the defenses; their response was delicate but made clear that the unfortunate creature had not gotten far. Still, on the Chunnel’s inauguration day in 1994, as Julian Barnes famously joked in The New Yorker, it was “as if lining up behind Mitterrand and the Queen as they cut the tricolor ribbons at Calais were packs of swivel-eyed dogs, fizzing foxes, and slavering squirrels, all waiting to jump on the first boxcar to Folkestone and sink their teeth into some Kentish flesh.”
Fortunately, after nearly twenty years of operation, the rabies invasion of Britain has yet to materialize. The most recent rabid animal to be unwittingly imported was in 2008; it came not from France but from Sri Lanka, by air, and it was diagnosed while still in quarantine.
Sensationalism aside, westerners no longer have much reason to fear rabies as acutely as we do. Meanwhile, though, plenty of other zoonotic diseases—and their host species—are lining up to terrify us in the twenty-first century. From the monkeys, we have monkeypox, which more than ninety Americans contracted in 2003 after a batch of prairie dogs got infected at a pet store. Chikungunya and dengue fever, two more diseases that lurk in primate populations but spread via mosquito, have been expanding their range: in 2010, dengue was even found to be circulating in Miami. From the bats, we have the formidable Hendra and Nipah viruses, which cause encephalitis that kills human cases at rates upward of 50 percent. Nipah is perhaps the scariest of all, because it has already demonstrated its ability to spread from person to person; a survey of 122 human cases in Bangladesh found that 87 died from the disease, with more than half having been caused by human-to-human transmission.
Beyond these exotic new arrivals, of course, we have our annual bouts with the granddaddy of them all: influenza, whose yearly mutations wipe out thousands of people worldwide, with the threat of killing hundreds of times that when a particularly effective strain comes along. In 2009, it was the swine flu that snuffled back with a vengeance. Nearly three-quarters of a century after Patrick Laidlaw and Richard Shope identified the Spanish influenza as a disease of the pig, the H1N1 strain infected tens of millions of people, making it the first certified global pandemic since HIV/AIDS. The death toll was modest by pandemic standards but still significant, with more than fourteen thousand deaths confirmed and significantly more than that suspected.
Swine flu showed the incredible and abiding psychological power of animal origins in the cultural reception of disease. Once the flu’s porcine origins had been revealed, there was little to stop the general public around the world from branding it a pig disease, despite all the caveats—no, you can’t get it from eating pork—piled on at the urging of nervous governments. The standard naming convention for years had been to identify flu strains by country of origin, à la “Spanish influenza.” But this proved to be even less tenable, politically, than the animal name: Mexican officials and commentators rose up in outrage at attempts to brand H1N1 the “Mexican flu,” whereas the pigs could find no similarly eloquent advocates. “Swine flu” stuck.
The Muslim world took the swineness of the swine flu particularly hard. In Afghanistan, the nation’s lone pig—Khanzir (Pig), which lives in the Kabul zoo—was placed unceremoniously into quarantine. Shops in the United Arab Emirates pulled all pork products from their shelves, and imports were suspended throughout the region. Tunisia went so far as to ban its citizens from carrying out the pilgrimage to Mecca, for fear that they might return with the disease. Swine flu did occasion some levity, at least, among newspaper cartoonists in Muslim countries, who used it as another excuse to tar their longtime adversaries (and mutual distrusters of pork), the Israelis. Qatar’s Al-Watan newspaper, for example, ran a cartoon called “The Flu in Israel,” in which one point of the six-pointed Jewish star formed a pig’s head; less than a week later, it ran another sketch called “The Peace Process,” in which an Arab is depicted as a surgeon, Israel as a flu-ridden pig. The same week in the UAE, Al-Khalij’s cartoon entitled “The Racism Flu” stuck a pig nose on the face of Israel’s foreign minister. The following week, an Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Ali Osman, made this connection quite a bit more explicit when he declared that Jews were the source of all pigs and thus responsible for the outbreak.
Egypt, in fact, was the site of the most dramatic reaction to the pandemic: the wholesale slaughter of the country’s 300,000 pigs, despite the lack (at the time of the edict) of a single documented case in either pigs or humans. These pigs were the treasured property of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority; in Cairo, a devoted population of Coptic trash collectors, called the zabaleen, had for decades employed thousands of scavenging pigs in disposing of the city’s waste. But relations between Muslims and Christians have for decades been tense, sometimes erupting into outright violence, and it was hard not to see this preemptive move by the government as an act of prejudice carried out via the law.
A cynical view of the government’s motives seemed especially justified once the methods of the massive pig cull became known. Officials had promised that the animals would be humanely slaughtered, with throats cut, and the meat preserved; but an Egyptian newspaper, after following a truck of seized pigs, found that their treatment was nothing short of barbaric. Video footage shows workers using a front-end loader to fill an enormous dump truck with screaming, squirming pigs, piled atop one another. Then the truck deposits the pigs at a vast burial ground, where they are killed slowly—“covered with chemical products and left for thirty or forty minutes until they are dead,” one worker tells the camera—and then unceremoniously covered with quicklime. Other amateur footage showed pigs brained in the streets with metal poles, piglets stabbed to death.
It was a scene that could have played out in the nineteenth-century streets of London or Paris, except with a different animal as victim. For all the ways that scientific advancement during the past century or so has served to beat back superstition, it’s worth reflecting that our zoonotic sleuthing in particular—our establishment, beginning with Y. pestis in 1894, that most of our myriad afflictions have an origin in animals—has been something of a Pandora’s box. For centuries, after all, we suffered through waves of flu without having to blame some different creature for each set of shivers. Today, though, every new strain will expose some species to the sort of TV coverage normally reserved (at least where animals are concerned) for shark attacks alone. Four thousand years after the Laws of Eshnunna, and more than a century after Pasteur slew rabies, acquiring a disease from animals still shocks us, and, as the pigs of Cairo discovered, it can still drive humans to hysterical violence.
* It’s this variety that best fits Chuck Klosterman’s puckish notion of zombies as a metaphor for our high-tech modern life: “Continue the termination. Don’t stop believing. Don’t stop deleting. Return your voice mails and nod your agreements. This is the zombies’ world, and we just live in it.”
* Today’s scientists believe that AIDS most likely arose through the hunting of monkeys and apes for bush meat.
* There is a curious American footnote to this peculiarly British outbreak of hysteria. For a few months in the fall of 1977, the horror writer Stephen King lived in England, during which time he penned the first draft of Cujo, America’s most famous rabies-horror yarn. King has always maintained that the inspiration for the novel came from “reading a story in the paper in Portland, Maine, where this little kid was savaged by a Saint Bernard and killed.” But it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t at least subconsciously influenced by the rabies-horror boom in Britain. He could hardly have been unaware of either book while in England, particularly because the latter book, The Rage, has an almost identical title to a novel of his own—Rage—that he had just published under his pen name, Richard Bachman.