Rabid (34 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 80  
the great wave arrived:
Ibid., 13.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 95  
On those instances when they did diverge:
Lester King,
The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 59–60.

 95  
saw the body mechanistically:
Ibid., 65–83.

 96  
From November to May, Rush:
David Hawke Freeman,
Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 48.

 96  
“Having dined on beef, peas, and bread”:
Ibid., 57–58.

 96  
“mischievous effects on the nervous system”:
Ibid., 110.

 96  
how to make saltpeter:
Ibid., 127, 136.

 96  
Rush inoculated Patrick Henry:
Ibid., 130.

 97  
on hand to perform battlefield medicine:
Ibid., 178.

 97  
a tradition, beginning at least with Boerhaave:
John Blaisdell, “A Frightful, but Not Necessarily Fatal, Madness: Rabies in Eighteenth-Century England and English North America” (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 1995), 36, 39.

 97  
“was uncommonly sizy in a boy”:
Rush,
Medical Inquiries and Observations,
311.

 97  
his 1792 doctoral thesis on the disease:
James Mease,
An Inaugural Dissertation on the Disease Produced by the Bite of a Mad Dog, or Other Rabid Animal
(Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1792).

 98  
a second pamphlet on rabies:
James Mease,
Observations on the Arguments of Professor Rush, in Favour of the Inflammatory Nature of the Disease Produced by the Bite of a Mad Dog
(Whitehall, Eng.: William Young, 1801).

 98  
“One of the first things I can remember”:
Unpublished autobiographical notes, 2, James Mease Archive, UCLA Biomedical Library.

 99  
a comical ditty, called “The Two Dog Shows”:
Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 70.

 99–100
“Le chien est une machine à aimer”
:
Gordon Stables,
Notre ami le chien
(Paris: J. Rothschild, 1897), 1.

100  
“Great Dog Massacres”:
Kathleen Kete, “
La Rage
and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century,”
Representations,
no. 22 (Spring 1988), 90 and n12.

100  
In England, the preferred method of dispatch:
Ritvo,
Animal Estate,
191–92.

100  
“turned ordinary people into murderers”:
Pemberton and Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
74.

100  
“Constantinople and Africa are rabies-free”:
Kete, “
La Rage
and the Bourgeoisie,” 97.

100  
reports were coming in from India:
Ritvo,
Animal Estate,
174.

100  
“exhausted” their “nervous system”:
Ibid., 180.

100  
“Hydrophobia makes its appearance”:
Pemberton and Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
31.

100  
Different theories fingered different breeds:
Ritvo,
Animal Estate,
181.

100  
One letter writer to the London
Times
:
Pemberton and Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
31.

101  
In the 1850s, France created:
Kete, “
La Rage
and the Bourgeoisie,” 100.

101  
Britain had a similar tax:
Ritvo,
Animal Estate,
179.

101  
“its instinct impels it, at times”:
George Fleming,
Rabies and Hydrophobia
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), 194.

101  
“invariably express an exaggerated attachment”:
Kete, “
La Rage
and the Bourgeoisie,” 101.

103  
the strange dog, clearly in distress:
Elizabeth Gaskell,
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
(London: Smith, Elder, 1857), 308–10.

103  
“I doubt whether…no harm will ensue”:
Charlotte Brontë,
Shirley
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), 451.

104  
“would have been, had she been placed in health”:
Gaskell,
Life of Charlotte Brontë,
302.

104n  
“The surprise is not that the Brontës died so young”:
Beth Torger-son,
Reading the Brontë Body
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2–3.

105  
what he calls “biological horror”:
Jason Colavito,
Knowing Fear
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), 78.

105  
“a bizarre liminal creature poised somewhere”:
Ibid., 65.

105  
an 1830 letter to the London
Times
:
Times
(London), June 4, 1830.

106  
“with ape-like fury”:
Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886), 37.

106  
“Leaving to the patient all the faculties”:
Kete,
Beast in the Boudoir,
101.

107  
“vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects”:
Letter reprinted in
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: The University Society, 1902), 335.

107  
“a violent delirium, resisting the efforts”:
Ibid., 336.

108  
R. Michael Benitez developed a theory:
R. Michael Benitez, “Rabies,”
Maryland Medical Journal
45 (1996): 765–69.

109 a  
thoroughly dubious 1830 address:
H. W. Dewhurst,
Observations on the Probable Causes of Rabies, or Madness, in the Dog
(London: published for the author, 1831), 9–14.

109  
one generally respected text from 1857:
Kete,
Beast in the Boudoir,
103.

109  
an 1845 proposal, penned by a certain Monsignor:
“Project for the Prevention of Hydrophobia in Man,” translated in
Monthly Journal of Medical Science,
Nov. 1845, 878–79.

110  
In 1830, when the British Parliament:
Pemberton and Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen,
24–25.

110  
a tally of rabies experts surveyed by M. J. Bourrel:
Kete,
Beast in the Boudoir,
105.

111  
“that rabid man related by Haller”:
Rossi, trans. Dell’Orto, “Mylabris Fulgurita—Its Use in Hydrophobia,”
New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal
11 (Jan. 1884): 539.

111  
Bachelet and Froussart emphasize the weakness:
Kete,
Beast in the Boudoir,
102.

111–12
l’enfant du diable,
or “the child of the devil”:
William Baillie-Grohman,
Camps in the Rockies
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 401.

112  
“there is no wild beast in the West”:
Theodore Roosevelt,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), 33–34.

112  
In the 1870s, when the army colonel:
Richard Irving Dodge,
The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877), 95.

112  
Roosevelt, in one of his memoirs, recalled:
Roosevelt,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,
33–34.

112  
Perhaps the most spectacular attack:
Fred Gowans,
Rocky Mountain Rendezvous: A History of the Fur Trade Rendezvous, 1825–1840
(Salt Lake City: G. M. Smith/Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), 80–95.

113  
Another rabies-addled wolf rampaged:
Dodge,
Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants,
97–98.

114  
“was saved on account of wolf biting through pants”:
Benteen to Theodore Goldin, Feb. 22, 1896, in “The Benteen-Goldin Letters,” mimeographed (ca. 1952), Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

114  
quantities of the deadly poison strychnine:
Baillie-Grohman,
Camps in the Rockies,
406.

114  
The anthropologist George Bird Grinnell:
George Bird Grinnell,
Blackfoot Lodge Tales
(New York: Scribner, 1892), 283.

114  
Colonel Dodge put forward the truly odd claim:
Richard Irving Dodge,
Our Wild Indians
(Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1882), 320–21.

114–15
one particularly tantalizing Native American cure:
American Farmer,
Feb. 1, 1828, 367.

115  
“From the colonists’ perspective, Indians”:
Jon Coleman,
Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 42–43.

115  
“wild beasts and beast-like men”:
Richard Hildreth,
The History of the United States of America
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), 1:281.

115  
“act like wolves and are to be dealt withal as wolves”:
Coleman,
Vicious,
43.

115  
One tribe, the Skidi Pawnee:
Ibid., 45–46.

116  
“There was not the slightest danger from them”:
Francis Parkman,
The Oregon Trail
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1872), 324.

116  
forgoing the purchase of a carriage:
Thomas Brock,
Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine and Bacteriology
(Washington, D.C.: American Society for Microbiology, 1999), 22–23.

116  
began his studies of anthrax in 1873:
Ibid., 31–35.