The horrible symptoms of rabies have inspired werewolves , vampires and other monsters
In 1855, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the horrible murder of a wife by her new husband. The story unfolded in the French countryside, where the woman's parents had first prevented the couple's engagement "because of the strangeness of the behavior sometimes observed in the young man", whereas he "was elsewhere a very good party ".
The parents finally consented and the marriage took place. Shortly after the newlyweds left to consummate their bond, "shouts of fear" came from their quarters. People quickly ran to find "the poor girl ... in the sufferings of death - her torn and lacerated chest in the most horrible way, and the miserable husband in a fit of unbridled madness covered with blood, having in fact devoured a part of the unfortunate girl's breast.
The bride died soon after. Her husband, after "a resistance of the most violent", has also died.
What could have caused this horrible story? It is then remembered, in response to questions from a doctor, that the groom had already been "bitten by a foreign dog". The passage from the madness of the dog to the man seemed to be the only possible reason for the appalling turn of events.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the episode as "a sad and painful case of hydrophobia," or, in today's language, rage .
But the story read like a story of Gothic horror. It was essentially a werewolf story: the mad dog's bite provoked a hideous metamorphosis, which turned his human victim into an infamous monster whose vicious sexual drive led to obscene violence.
My new book, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920 , Explores the Meanings Hidden Behind the Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920 stories about rabies. Variants of the history of rabid married were told again and again in the English-language newspapers in North America since at least the beginning of the XVIII th century and continued as late as in the 1890s.
The Eagle story is essentially a folk tale about rabid dogs and the thin line of demarcation between the human and the animal. Rage created a visceral fear because it was a disease that seemed to turn people into rabid beasts.
A terrifying and deadly disease
The historian Eugen Weber once observed that the French peasants of the XIX th century feared "especially wolves, stray dogs and fire" . Canine madness - or the disease we know today as rage - has fueled nightmares for centuries.
Other infectious diseases - such as cholera, typhoid and diphtheria - killed many more people in the 19 th and early 20 th century. The cry of "crazy dog" nevertheless aroused an immediate sense of terror, for a mere dog bite could mean a long ordeal followed by certain death.
Modern medicine knows that rabies is caused by a virus. Once it enters the body, it reaches the brain through the nervous system. The typical delay of several weeks or months between initial exposure and the onset of symptoms means that rabies is no longer a death sentence if a patient quickly receives immune antibody injections and a vaccine, in order to reinforce his immunity after meeting a suspect animal. Although it is rare for people to die of rabies in North America, the disease still kills tens of thousands of people around the world each year .
According to nineteenthury sources , after an incubation period of four to 12 weeks, symptoms may begin with a vague sense of agitation. They then progress to spasmodic episodes characteristic of rabies, insomnia, excitement, feverishness, rapid pulse, drooling, and labored breathing. It is not uncommon for victims to have hallucinations or other mental disorders.
Efforts to reduce access to drug-related violence have often failed, and doctors have been able to do nothing but observe and testify. The disease follows its inevitably fatal course, usually over a period of two to four days. Even today, rabies remains essentially incurable as soon as clinical signs appear .
Centuries ago, the loss of body control and rationality triggered by rabies seemed to be an attack on the basic humanity of the victims. From a real dreaded disease transmitted by animals have appeared thorny visions of supernatural forces that have transferred the powers of evil animals and turned people into monsters.
Bites that turn humans into animals
American stories of the XIX th century were never directly invoked the supernatural. But the description of the symptoms indicated tacit assumptions about how the disease transmitted the essence of the infected animal to the suffering human being.
Newspapers often portrayed those who got rabies from dog bites as barking and grunting like dogs, while victims of cat bites scratched and spat. Hallucinations, respiratory spasms and uncontrollable convulsions resulted from the evil imprint of the rabid animal.
Traditional precautionary measures have also shown how North Americans have quietly assumed a blurred boundary between humanity and animality. The folk remedies claimed that dog bite victims could protect themselves from rabies by killing the dog that had already bitten them, by applying the hair of the offending dog to the wound or cutting his tail.
Such preventive measures implied the necessity of cutting an invisible and supernatural link between a dangerous animal and its human prey.
Sometimes the disease has left strange traces. When a Brooklyn resident died of rabies in 1886, the New York Herald reported a terrifying appearance: minutes after the man's last breath, "the bluish ring on his hand - the mark of the deadly bite Newfoundland ... has disappeared. Only death has broken the pernicious hold of the mad dog.
The roots of vampires in rabid dogs
It is possible that in addition to werewolves, vampire stories also originate in rabies.
Dr. Juan Gómez-Alonso emphasized the link between vampirism and rabies in the capillary symptoms of the disease - distorted sounds, exaggerated facial appearances, agitation and sometimes wild and aggressive behavior that made people with monstrous than humans.
Moreover, in different folkloric traditions of Eastern Europe, vampires have not turned into bats, but into wolves or dogs, the key vectors of rabies.
As werewolves, vampires and other monsters descend on the street for Halloween, remember that behind the annual ritual of candy and disguise, hide the darkest recesses of the imagination. Here, animals, disease and fear intertwine, and monsters materialize in this subtle point of intersection between animality and humanity.
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