Rabid (9 page)

The three titans of medieval Islamic medicine—al-Rāzī (known to European history as Rhazes), Ibn Sīna (Avicenna), and Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar)—all addressed rabies in some detail in their central works. The first of these scholars, al-Rāzī, who wrote and practiced in Baghdad at the turn of the tenth century, recounted the cases of rabies he had personally witnessed:

His preferred treatment for bites—cauterizing and scarifying the wound, followed by the application of suction cups to it—is as sensible as any described to that time.

Ibn Zuhr, who wrote in Spain between 1121 and 1162, included an essay called “On Furious Madness” in the
Kitab al-Taysîr,
his magnum opus. As al-Rāzī did before him, he anchors his observation with a personal narrative. “My father,” he wrote, “to whom God grants mercy, taught me that a mule, having been affected by this sickness, will aim
to bite a man. The latter, fleeing before the animal, will enter into an alleyway whose entrance is quite narrow. The mule will rush towards the entrance, head down, and will become so tightly compressed in it that it will only be able to extricate itself by its own death.”

The sentiments on rabies expounded by Ibn Sīna, the most heralded of all medieval Islamic authors, seem lamentably off-key by today’s standards, even when compared with the views of his contemporaries. In the fourth book of his mammoth
Al-qanun fi al-tibb
(
The Canon of Medicine
)—composed during the early eleventh century, in Persia—the great doctor expressed the belief that heat and cold helped foment the disease, causing this “serious and venomous melancholy” in dogs. Moreover, he attributed it to the consumption of bad water and bad meat. Among the symptoms Ibn Sīna describes in human patients is a hallucination of little dogs, which one supposes to be possible enough. But among the treatments he recommends for human sufferers is cantharis, the legendary aphrodisiac that today we call Spanish fly; this seems a particularly odd choice for a malady whose symptoms, even on Ibn Sīna’s list, include priapism.

A fairly lengthy treatment of rabies is found in the writings of Moses Maimonides, a twelfth-century Jewish philosopher and physician who practiced in Morocco and then, later, in Egypt. He recognized, contrary to widely held belief, that the bite of a mad dog did not cause greater pain than that of a healthy one. More important, he states outright that any treatments for the rabid bite are useless after the onset of hydrophobia. He also recognized that symptoms of madness in humans can often be delayed by a month or more. Besides the time-honored treatments, which he endorses in passing—widening the bite through incision, bloodletting through cupping, and so on—he prescribes a dizzying array of potions and poultices: the pulverized ashes of river crabs, drunk in water daily; bitter almonds crushed in honey and applied to the affected site; a raw bean, chewed into a paste and then rubbed on the wounds; or, by the same method, crushed wheat, or onions, or unleavened bread. Maimonides wisely urges caution on
bites, instructing readers to fear the worst. “If the condition of the dog is in doubt,” he writes, “conduct yourself as if the dog is mad.”

Artifact collectors have preserved one last rabies treatment from the era, one that seems to have begun in the twelfth century: the magic-medicinal bowl, a metal vessel elaborately inscribed with various therapeutic instructions, such as hot water to aid colic or saffron water to ease a difficult childbirth. A cure for rabies, and for animal poisons more generally, was often promised by these bowls. The oldest surviving specimen, made in 1167 for the Syrian ruler Nuūr al-Dīn Mahmuūd ibn Zangī, claims to assuage not just the rabid bite (through the drinking of milk, water, or oil, “by the help of God Almighty”) but also chest pain, migraine, and even demonic possession.

During the early days of the Inquisition, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, a mysterious brotherhood of healers roamed from town to town, offering protection against rabies. These were the so-called
saludadores,
and they crackled (so they claimed) with powers bestowed by hallowed saints. They were blood relatives of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and carried her mark: a toothed wheel, representing the apparatus on which the third-century saint was tortured to death. Or they were in league with Saint Quiteria, another early Christian martyr whose intercession was often called upon for protection from rabies. (Quiteria also had the distinction, in Portuguese Christian lore, of being the leader of a savage all-girl team of nonuplet infidel slayers.) Through the grace of these sanctified women,
saludadores
could nullify the savage bite, often with their saliva or their breath. They could touch red-hot iron, wash their hands with boiling oil, or even clamber inside a fiery oven without injury.

The Inquisition saw such claims as heretical, and its official position was to squelch the
saludadores
. The few firsthand accounts from these healers that survive tend to be from those who confessed, under questioning, to having been frauds. In 1619, a shoemaker named Gabriel Monteche confessed that he had

He went on to describe how he snookered the marks:

Chicanery like this, if indeed this confession was honest and not forced, was probably anomalous: folk healing never sustains itself entirely on the basis of bad faith, and no doubt the majority believed in their powers every bit as fervently as did their patients. By that time, medicine in Spain and Portugal had become licensed, normalized—from the physicians in official hospitals, which sprouted up over the sixteenth century, all the way down to the lowly “barber-surgeons,” who both shaved and operated on customers. But then as now, for reasons of cost and of idiosyncratic superstitious belief, many patients preferred unofficial practitioners such as
saludadores
. It did not hurt, of course, that in many cases the official medicine was no more effective. Certainly this was the case with rabies, which was no more curable (or even preventable) than it had been in the second century
A.D.

Many Spaniards preferred their religion unofficial, too. We tend
to think of the Inquisition as a totalitarian regime, at least on spiritual matters, but in fact it did little to temper the riot of local eccentricities across the lands it ruled. On two occasions during the 1570s, a Spanish royal office made a survey throughout the kingdom, asking two or more representatives from each town to answer a series of questions about its population and practices. Some of the questions involved religious belief: respondents were asked to detail the chapels in the town, the miracles that had taken place there, the holy and fast days observed there. The office wound up surveying 513 towns, representing a little more than 127,000 households; and the replies enumerated a remarkable diversity of religious practice. On the question of holy days, locally observed as part of a vow to some saint, there were more than fourteen hundred different vows spelled out, made to dozens of sactified figures. Residents of Cabezarados, which sits roughly halfway between Madrid and Córdoba in the outskirts of Ciudad Real, reported that they had recently lapsed in their vow to Saint Quiteria, causing a rabid wolf to kill a young man and bite a number of cows. “Since these events,” the royal chroniclers later wrote, “the townspeople have observed and do observe the old vow with much devotion and hold a solemn procession and feed all the poor in the town; and everyone from the town eats in the house of the mayordomo that day, each paying his share.”

In practice, the Inquisition in Spain took a stance toward the
saludadores
that one might call benign neglect. One intriguing reason for this, as the Spanish historian María Tausiet has documented, is that
saludadores
also had a reputation as crackerjack witch-hunters. Documents from the era show that many of them, despite their so-called marks of the devil, worked closely with both the inquisitorial and the secular justice systems in identifying witches. It was not uncommon for investigators to bring a
saludador
along with them as they swept into town. Inquisition records note that a healer named Andrés Mascarón condemned thirteen women in the village of Bielsa as witches,
saying that “on seeing a witch he felt his flesh burn, and the older the witch the more it burned.” Four of these women were summarily hanged, and the rest sent into exile; the town paid him generously for his efforts.

One can infer, through this strange dual role of the
saludador,
the demonic nature of rabies as it was perceived at the time. The healer was the exorcist of hydrophobia, the diviner of witchcraft; he was, that is, the enemy of all the malign animal spirits that seized unawares the innocent human soul. So many of the superstitions that ran roughshod through the fevered medieval imagination had what was, at base, an animal element. In the
next chapter
, we chart the zoonotic idea as it manifested itself in two enduring terrors of bestial infection: the werewolf and the vampire.

*
This travesty did not go unnoticed in the church’s reconstruction. The gilt frame of one enameled display bears a chronogram, or a Latin message carrying a date inside it, reading: “
ConCVLCaVerVntsanCtIfICatIoneM
”—or, “They have spurned that which is holy,” with the numerals spelling out 1568.

*
That is, the hound should possess a head like that of a snake, a neck like that of a duck, feet like those of a cat, a tail like that of a rat, and so on. This, it should humbly be noted, perfectly describes our own dog Mia, a whippet.

†
More morbidly, we have the story, handed down regarding the death of Mary, Queen of Scots (1587), that one of her executioners, while removing the garters from her corpse, “espied her little dogg which was crept under her clothes,” a poor creature that eventually “came and lay betweene her head and her shoulders.”

*
In our most recent outbreak of swine flu, the pigs were not so lucky, particularly in the Muslim world: see
Chapter 6
.

*
Another gastronomic treatment is supplied by
Le ménagier de Paris,
a fourteenth-century guide to domestic life that prescribes, at the end of a long list of recipes, a novel treatment for rabid dog bite. “Take a crust of bread,” it advises, “and write what follows:
Bestera bestie nay brigonay dictera sagragan es domina siat siat siat
.”

The Werewolf
by Lucas Cranach, c. 1510–15.

I
n September 1998, the journal
Neurology
—which usually consumes its column inches with such thrilling topics as “detection of elevated levels of α-synuclein oligomers in CSF from patients with Parkinson disease”—gave voice instead to an eccentric theory on a historical conundrum. Over four densely cited pages, a Spanish physician named Juan Gómez-Alonso put forward the argument that rabies, a subject dear to neurologists for its uniquely devastating effects upon the brain, might also serve as an explanation for one of our oldest horrors: the vampire, whose roots stretch back to ancient Greece but whose alleged romps through eastern Europe during the eighteenth century launched a mass fascination that continues to this day.