Rabid (5 page)

Like the Egyptians, the Greeks loved their graceful hunting hounds and considered them loyal friends and companions. A new literary genre, the
cynegeticon,
sprang up in ancient Greece to extol the hound and to prescribe its proper breeding and care. The most prominent (and likely first) of these guidebooks was penned by the soldier-historian Xenophon, who himself had witnessed the power of
lyssa
during a military campaign: of a fleeing enemy he wrote, with a hint of boast, “They were afraid that some
lyssa,
like that of dogs, had seized our men.” After he was exiled from Athens to the Peloponnesian town of Scillus, Xenophon spent his postmilitary years in a happy reverie of hunting and writing, pursuits that converged in his
Cynegeticus
. He describes his ideal hounds in sumptuous detail: flat and muscular head, small thin ears, long straight tail, sparkling black eyes; the
forelegs “short, straight, round and firm”; the hips “round and fleshy at the back, not close at the top, and smooth on the inside”; the hind legs “much longer than the forelegs and slightly bent.” Profound respect suffuses every line of the
Cynegeticus
. Xenophon chastens the hunter not to employ collars that might chafe the dog’s coat. He prescribes the praise that should be showered upon the hounds while they chase the hare. “Now, hounds, now!” one is enjoined to shout. “Well done! Bravo, hounds! Well done, hounds!”
*

Nevertheless, scavenging dogs also roamed Greek fields and towns, carrying upon them the stench of death.
The
Iliad
invokes the dog perhaps twenty times as a devourer of corpse flesh, the first instance occurring in the second sentence of the epic’s very first stanza: “Many a brave soul did [the anger of Achilles] send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures.” Hector’s father, the old king Priam, captures the sad irony of the fate that lies in store for him as he contemplates his imminent death at the hand of Achilles. “My dogs in front of my doorway,” he foretells,

The word “dog” was also hurled as an epithet to decry the shameless man or woman;
The Iliad
finds Iris slinging it at Athena and Helen of Troy applying it ruefully to herself.

Beyond the dog’s fondness for corpse flesh, it also could succumb at any time (literally or metaphorically) to the frenzied madness of
lyssa
. One need look no further than the mythic fate of Actaeon, the hunter whose severe misfortune it is to stumble across Diana, goddess of the hunt, as she bathes in the woods. To punish him, she turns him into a stag, prompting a second, bestial transformation that causes his death: his own beloved hounds, seized by
lyssa
at the sight of his new form, set upon him and tear him limb from limb.

Ovid, in the
Metamorphoses
—an all-encompassing volume about human-to-animal transformations—renders both transitions with awful acuity, allowing us to experience both from inside the hunter’s still-human consciousness. Actaeon realizes he has become a stag only when he witnesses his reflection in a pool. “Poor me!” he tries to exclaim at the sight but manages only to emit a groan, and thereby learns that groaning, for him, “was now speech.” His body has become alien to him—“tears streamed down cheeks that were no longer his”—even as his mind is left untouched, permitting him to grasp the full horror of his situation.

Almost immediately thereafter come the hounds, formerly his charges but now his pursuers, “rushing at him like a storm.” His conscious mind lingers on each of them, one by one, noting their names and, at times, an endearing bit of detail that only an owner could know: Speedy and Wolf are siblings, while Shepherdess leads two puppies from a recent litter; Sylvia has “lately been gored by a boar.” Some thirty-five dogs are noted by name, with “many more too numerous to mention,” all dogs he has raised and fed; now they charge
toward him in a slavering mob, “out to taste his blood.” It is hard to know which of these twinned faces of
lyssa
is more horrible, in either Ovid’s reckoning or ours: the human becoming animal, or the hunter being hunted by his own treasured dogs.

Perhaps the most enduring ancient symbol of the dog’s two warring natures is Cerberus, that terrifying watchdog whose vigilant gaze and fearsome jaws kept the dead from escaping Hades and returning to the world of the living. Descriptions of his physiology vary significantly in the different retellings—his heads number two, sometimes three, sometimes fifty, or even a hundred; his tail is that of a snake, or not; snake heads sometimes sprout from his head and neck like a gruesome mane. But despite all these monstrous innovations he is consistently described as a dog. A “cursed” or “dreaded” or “savage” dog he may be, but he remains a dog nonetheless, the unmistakable kin of those that walk the earth and lick its inhabitants. He could even be a good dog, at times. As described by Hesiod, Cerberus was quite friendly to the dying, at least when they arrived; he positively welcomed them, in fact, “with actions of his tail and both ears.” It was only when they attempted to pass
back
into life that he would set upon them savagely, even devour them. Death is a boundary that can be freely crossed in only one direction, and so guarding that boundary is a perfect role for a dog: natural friend on the one hand—or head; savage attacker and corpse devourer on the other; both natures cohabiting inside one vexing four-footed form.

It was more than just the power of Cerberus’s many jaws that was to be feared. In the
Metamorphoses,
a list of poisonous substances includes “slaver from Cerberus,” along with a creation myth whereby that rabid saliva, sprayed from the hellhound’s lips and flecking a field of battle, gave rise to a notoriously poisonous plant called aconite—also known, tellingly, as wolfsbane. As the veterinary historian John Blaisdell has noted, symptoms of aconite poisoning in humans bear some passing similarity to those of rabies: they can include frothy saliva, impaired vision, vertigo, and finally a coma. It is not improbable that some ancient Greeks would have believed that this poison,
mythically born of Cerberus’s lips, was literally the same as that to be found inside the mouth of a rabid dog.

Until just the past century—and even then only in the developed world—rabies has been experienced by humans as a disease of the dog, a peculiarly canine madness that could reproduce a similar, fatal madness in humans. But all the while, the disease also lurked inside another, far more shadowy species: the bat. Indeed, recent research has indicated that bats harbored the disease even earlier than dogs, going back at least seven thousand years and as far as twelve thousand years, far before the first written languages and perhaps even before dogs were domesticated from wolves.

How was this calculation made? The answer flows from two simple facts about how viruses evolve over time. The first is that most mutations in a virus are neither beneficial nor harmful to its propagation; instead, they’re neutral, trivially altering the genetic sequence without changing the virus’s overall fitness in any way. The second fact is that these mutations tend, over large populations and long periods of time, to happen on a predictable schedule. So given a set of related viral strains, a computer can analyze the patterns of genetic difference and arrange them into a rough phylogenetic tree, showing which strain evolved from which and how long ago the divergences occurred. In 2001, two researchers at France’s Institut Pasteur used this technique to investigate a large set of rabies virus strains—thirty-six from dogs and seventeen from bats—and the results were fairly clear: the enigmatic bat, a distant presence for most of the cultural history of rabies, was probably responsible for infecting the dog, rather than the other way around.

This so-called molecular clock research has led to many other insights about the origins of disease. In particular, it’s shown us how many of our worst killers, pathogens that have racked humanity since the earliest civilizations, evolved out of animal populations. Measles, we now know, evolved from a disease in cattle; similarly, the various strains of influenza, as we still see today in our annual flu scares,
readily pass back and forth between us and our livestock (for more on this, see
Chapter 6
). Some of these zoonotic leaps from animal to man have been understood fully only during the past decade or so, as genome sequencing has allowed scientists to trace more precisely the genetic lineage of pathogens. For example, a team led by the Stanford epidemiologist Nathan Wolfe announced in 2009 that it had isolated the origins of malaria in a parasite of chimpanzees, which presumably spread to humans through mosquito bites.

New sleuthing has yielded particularly intriguing details about smallpox, arguably the deadliest disease in history. A 2007 study, headed up by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traced the notorious killer back to a virus in rodents, estimating that it made the leap to humans at least sixteen thousand years ago. What is especially satisfying is the team’s identification of two separate human strains, an earlier and milder version that cropped up in west Africa and the Americas, and a more severe version—the progenitor of the strain that slew untold millions over the past millennium before its eradication in the late 1970s—that emerged from Asia a bit later. This helps explain why the literature, medical and otherwise, of the Greeks and Romans provides little evidence that highly fatal smallpox was common, even though archaeological evidence shows the clear presence of a smallpox-like condition in ancient Egypt. The most spectacular example of this is the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V, on whose shriveled skin can clearly be seen the pustular pattern typical of the disease. (This possibly answers the vexing Egyptological question of why Ramses V was not buried for almost two years after his death, when other pharaohs were interred just seventy days after mummification; either fear of infection from his corpse or a paucity of healthy embalmers might account for the lag.)

Smallpox was far from the only ancient epidemic with its origins in the rodent. Both plague and typhus ravaged by way of the rat, whose
fleas would transmit the deadly bugs to unsuspecting humans. For all the emphasis placed on livestock in the development of civilization, the case can be made—and indeed has been made, most elegantly by the biologist Hans Zinsser in his 1935 book
Rats, Lice, and History
—that human affairs have been stirred far more vigorously by the rat, whose companionship with people has tended to be involuntary on our part but whose omnipresence among us, like that of the stray dog, became more or less inevitable with the emergence of the city. With most zoonotic leaps in disease, animal contact is the spark, but urbanization is the bone-dry tinder; a newly evolved pathogen can’t spread from person to person, after all, unless people run across one another in the first place.

How to treat the rabies patient or the dog-bite victim? Consider the predicament of an ancient physician on this terrible question. The cause of hydrophobia (the bite of a rabid animal) was often separated by many weeks from its effect (the onset of neurological symptoms), and only a fraction of bites—even assuming an animal that is actually rabid and not merely vicious—progressed to the fatal infection. Meanwhile, it was hard to distinguish real cases of hydrophobia from hysterical ones, which were common right up to the twentieth century. Worse, because of the relative paucity of cases, ancient medical scholars often compiled alleged cures from second- and thirdhand reports.

For all of these reasons we should forgive, at least to a point, the extraordinary nonsense that passed for rabies treatment in the ancient world. Let’s begin with bite treatment. Here again the
Sus´ruta samhita
deserves the most respect. Not only does it acknowledge, without wavering, the fatality of hydrophobia, but it prescribes a treatment for rabid bites—bleeding and cauterization of the wound—that is as sensible as any. (Also as delicious as any: the
Samhita
recommends cauterizing with clarified butter, which the patient is then invited to drink. It
also prescribes a sesame paste for the wound and advises that the patient be fed a special fire-baked cake made of rice, roots, and leaves. The Varanasian patient did not face death on an empty stomach.)

In ancient China, where mentions of rabies in extant texts are relatively spare, the disease does appear in Ge Hong’s “Handy Therapies for Emergencies,” from the third century
A.D.
Ge prescribes “moxibustion” for the wound, a process that involved burning mugwort, a species of wormwood, and applying it to the bitten region. This was likely to have been more effective, or at least to do less harm, than another of his recommendations: to kill the offending dog, remove its brain, and rub that on the wound.

Among the Greco-Romans, perhaps we should not be surprised that Celsus, the encyclopedist, drawing as he did on many different sources, some of uncertain provenance, should supply us with a far more varied list of dog-bite treatments. These include bleeding and cauterization, but also the application of salt, or even a brine pickle, to the wound. Some physicians, he says, send their patients to a steam bath, “there to sweat as much as their bodily strength allows, the wound being kept open in order that the poison may drop out freely from it.” After that, the doctors pour wine into the bite. “When this has been carried out for three days,” Celsus says, “the patient is deemed to be out of danger.”