Rabid (16 page)

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:

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,

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.