Rabid (6 page)

Things totter off the rails with Pliny the Elder. As with Ge Hong, Pliny’s thoughts tend to involve using the animal to treat the man. His best-known cure—to “insert in the wound ashes of hairs from the tail of the dog that inflicted the bite”—lives on today in our expression “hair of the dog,” referring to a not-quite-so-dubious hangover remedy. But Pliny thought that a maggot from any dead dog’s carcass would do the trick, as would a linen cloth soaked with the menstrual blood of a female dog. Or the rabid dog’s head could be burned to ashes, and the ashes applied to the wound; or the head could just be eaten outright.

Still not see a treatment that works for you? Let Dr. Pliny lay out some more options:

“This slough,” Pliny adds, “put away by itself in chests and drawers, destroys moths.”

To the credit of Pliny, and of Celsus (with one exception, below), all these proffered treatments address the rabid dog or its bite, not hydrophobia itself. But even the fatal manifestation of the disease occasioned some elaborate and entirely chimerical cures. Oddly, the methodists, whose observations about hydrophobic symptoms became increasingly admirable over the centuries, seem to get more addled when the subject is treatment. Both the anonymous Greek text and, later, Soranus himself wrote of treatment as if recovery were more likely than not. They recommended creating a spa-like atmosphere. “Have patients suffering from hydrophobia lie in rooms with good air well tempered,” remarked the anonymous author. “Massage
his limbs,” added Soranus, and “cover with warm, clean wool or cloths those parts that are affected by spasm.” Both authors presented hydrophobia as an acute attack that would often recede in time—a bewildering judgment that flies in the face of observable facts. They prescribed various poultices made from dates crushed with quinces, or olive oil, or ripe melon, or vine tendrils, or coriander. Some unnamed physicians, cited by Soranus, recommend that a plaster be made from hellebores—the flowering perennials—and applied to the anus.

The most remarkable, and perhaps fitting, prescription for hydrophobia is the one offered by Celsus, who, as noted previously, had the good sense to admit that there was “little help” for the hydrophobic patient at all. Yet he apparently could not refrain from offering just one little cure: that is, “to throw the patient unawares into a water tank which he has not seen beforehand.” He explains this method to be, as we might say today, win-win:

If this proto-waterboarding happens to spur muscle spasms in the subject, Celsus recommends he be “taken straight from the tank and plunged into a bath of hot oil.” A patient could be forgiven for preferring hydrophobia to that particular fate.

*
In the philosopher’s defense, R. H. A. Merlen, author of a fine volume entitled
De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity,
surmises that
cynanche
was actually itself a form of rabies—so-called dumb rabies, in which the afflicted dog, rather than raging, stands mute with its mouth agape. Merlen points out that Aristotle characterizes
cynanche
as fatal in dogs, unlike any commonly presenting throat malady.

*
Xenophon even enumerates, at humorous length, a list of ideal names for hounds: Psyche, Pluck, Buckler, Spigot, Lance, Lurcher, Watch, Keeper, Brigade, Fencer, Butcher, Blazer, Prowess, Craftsman, Forester, Counsellor, Spoiler, Hurry, Fury, Growler, Riot, Bloomer, Rome, Blossom, Hebe, Hilary, Jolity, Gazer, Eyebright, Much, Force, Trooper, Bustle, Bubbler, Rockdove, Stubborn, Yelp, Killer, Pêle-mêle, Strongboy, Sky, Sunbeam, Bodkin, Wistful, Gnome, Tracks, Dash—“short names,” he reasons, “which will be easy to call out.”

The basilica at Saint-Hubert,
2010
.

O
n the subject of Saint Hubert, protector of hunters, healer of rabies sufferers, we might as well begin with the myth; for while the truth about his life remains stubbornly opaque, it was the myth, and not the truth, that brought generations of fearful dog-bitten pilgrims from across Europe, by foot and horse and eventually even train, to be cured at the site where his holy relics resided.

The myth begins when Hubert is a young seventh-century nobleman in the Frankish kingdom, son of the Duke of Aquitaine. Hubert decides to spurn courtly life. He retreats to the deep forests of the Ardennes, the range of noble hills that roll through what is now Belgium and into the east of France, and devotes himself to the hunt. One Good Friday, so the legend goes, the young man is giving chase to a stag when the beast rears around, a crucifix hovering between its antlers. “Unless thou turnest to the Lord,” a heavenly voice intones, to the bewilderment of the stag’s pursuer, “and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into Hell.”

Hubert bows before the creature that a moment ago was his prey. “Lord,” he asks, “what wouldst Thou have me do?”

It is a startling cross-cultural transformation: this is the myth of
Actaeon, overhauled to serve a distinctly different cosmology. Again we have a hunter, surprised to find himself in the company of a deity. Again a stag is imbued supernaturally with consciousness. But the resolutions of these two brushes with divinity, Actaeon’s and Hubert’s, could not be more divergent. Vengeful Diana chooses to make Actaeon the stag, thereby condemning him to a senseless, though symbolically appropriate, death in his own hounds’ jaws. But the monotheistic deity, resonant with the divine sacrifice of the Christ story, makes Himself into the hunted form. To the early Christian mind, the Hubert tale also resounded because it played on both sides of a sometimes contradictory medieval fascination with the hunt. When hunting appears in medieval narratives, as the historian John Cummins notes, it generally “detaches a man…from his normal environment and, frequently, his companions, and takes him into unfamiliar territory”—territory that “is not merely topographical, but emotional and sometimes moral.” In popular romance, it was in pursuit of the stag that heroes proved themselves above all.

Yet the finest stag was as revered as (or perhaps more revered than) the finest hunter was. The most exalted prey in the medieval hunt, the hart was believed to be uniquely holy. A stag pursued by hounds would sometimes figure as a marginal illustration in Bibles to symbolize good encroached by evil; one Christian allegorist likened the ten points of its antlers to the Ten Commandments. Bestiaries, in their treatment of the stag, would sometimes invoke Psalm 42: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after you, O God.” The devil, meanwhile, was portrayed as a hunter, setting traps for his human prey. One fourteenth-century German work goes so far as to say that Christ himself was hunted down and killed by “the hounds of hell and the infernal huntsman, the devil.”

As that last example suggests, the dog was not seen in nearly so rosy a light. Though bestiaries often did remark on the helpful characteristics of dogs, they also lingered on not especially flattering examples: for instance, comparing the recalcitrant sinner to the dog that
returns to its own vomit. In general, the spread of Christianity from the fourth to the eighth century had brought along with it a more uniformly dark vision of the dog, a view that is literally inscribed in scripture: of the forty-odd times that “dog” or “dogs” appears in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, depictions of the creature range from revolting to merely distasteful. The best that the Bible can deign to say of a dog is this characteristically sardonic aphorism from the narrator of Ecclesiastes: “Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!”

From there, though, it just gets nastier. As a holy people, the Israelites are ordered not to eat the flesh of wild beasts; instead, “throw it to the dogs.” Dogs appear often as eaters of human flesh and drinkers of human blood. In 1 Kings alone, they are not just devouring corpses in the towns of Jeroboam and Baasha but also licking up the blood of Naboth; eating the flesh of his infamous murderess, Jezebel; and drinking the blood of her husband, Ahab, king of Israel. Five of the Psalms mention dogs, all painting the creatures as malign forces encroaching: for example, “Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet,” or “They return at evening, snarling like dogs, and prowl about the city.” The New Testament is hardly better. Our famous expression “pearls before swine” could just as easily have referred to man’s best friend, given the original verse from Matthew: “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” (It wasn’t the pigs that would tear you to pieces.) In Luke, the ultimate insult to the beggar Lazarus is the dogs that come to lick his sores. In Philippians, Paul enjoins his audience to watch out for “those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.” Even trippy Revelation gets in a parting shot, as the angel uses “the dogs” to lump together all those who will be left out come Judgment Day: “Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”

So in the medieval era, while popular storytelling lionized the hunter, the church’s symbology denigrated both him and his devoted canine huntmates; indeed, it sanctified the very animal they most avidly sought to kill. The genius of the Hubert myth is in its clever fusion of these two somewhat opposed views. Hubert, the noble-born huntsman who finds glory and mystery in the chase, is the hero, and yet the particular form of his glory is in his submission to the stag, rather than the other way around. As the huntsman to whom God revealed Himself in the chase, he becomes, in the saint-crazed cults of medieval Europe, a supernatural master of the hunt and a guardian against the most savage spirit of the dog, as incarnated in the rabid bite. The myth concludes with Hubert leaving the hunting life and entering the priesthood, after the stag tells him to call upon the local bishop. “Go and seek Lambert,” boomed the heavenly voice, “and he will instruct you.”

Now, as for that elusive truth. We do know a few stray facts. There was a Hubert, and there was a Lambert. The latter, at the time of Hubert’s supposed conversion, was the bishop of Maastricht, in what is now the Netherlands. We also know that in roughly the year 700, while on a trip to the nearby town of Liège, Lambert was murdered, though there are two differing and equally implausible accounts that describe the precise manner of his death. One places the doomed Lambert in a villa, lying on the floor during his murder, arms extended portentously in the position of the cross; another has him at the altar, with the assassin hurling a javelin from the congregation and piercing his heart. Here, of course, we are almost certainly back in the realm of myth. (As for the fate of the murderer, who both accounts agree was a miscreant called Dodo, we are assured that divine justice was soon done, as “his hidden parts were made rotten and stinking” and then “cast forth through his mouth.”)