Rabid

by Monica Murphy

  its instinct impels it, at times, to draw near to its master, as if to ask for relief from its sufferings; and, if permitted, it willingly tenders its recognition of the care bestowed on it by licking the hands or face. But these are perfidious caresses, against which every one should be warned.

  The French physician G. E. Fredet took this admonition further. In his view, this behavior in the early stages of rabies was not occasional and not confined to masters alone. Instead, such dogs “invariably express an exaggerated attachment and devotion to everyone who approaches them.” That is: even the friendliest dog on the street, or in an acquaintance’s home, might suddenly deliver a bite (or lick!) that became a death sentence.

  Given this dual nature of the dog, it is perhaps easy to imagine why fiction of the gothic persuasion, when hoping to conjure an atmosphere of gloom, would trot out so many snarling curs. Few gothic novels play this card better, or at least more often, than Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In the very first pages, when the tenant Lockwood walks up to visit his brooding landlord, Heathcliff, the visitor’s unwelcomeness is underscored by the hostility of his host’s dogs—in particular the mother dog, a “liver-coloured bitch pointer” that “broke into a fury, and leapt on my knees” and that (along with half a dozen other “four-footed fiends, of various sizes”) Lockwood is left to fend off with a fireplace poker. During the ensuing snowstorm, when he tries to escape Wuthering Heights by borrowing one of the house’s lanterns, the servant sics the slavering dogs on him to prevent the theft; on order, “two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the light.”

  It continues this way through much of the novel. A similar dog attack, we soon learn, played a pivotal role in the tale of Heathcliff and his lost love, Catherine Earnshaw. Although the two were inseparable for many years as children, Catherine’s life takes a turn when Skulker, the family bulldog of the wealthy Lintons, sets upon her savagely outside the Linton home. Heathcliff attempts to free her, prying at the dog’s jaws with a rock, but the beast holds fast, “his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendant lips streaming with bloody slaver.” Found mangled in the grip of this beast, Catherine is briefly adopted by the Lintons, who nurse her for five weeks—during which time she takes up, at least in part, not only their upper-class values but also an attachment for their son, Edgar, who thereafter will rival Heathcliff for her love.

  And indeed, during the final days of Catherine’s life, in the throes of a childbirth that will kill her, Heathcliff is possessed by what Brontë describes as something akin to canine madness, as the servant Nelly recounts:

  Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive. In fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species; it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so, I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.

  Emily Brontë herself beheld both aspects of the nineteenth-century dog while growing up in her father’s parsonage. On the one side, there was her bulldog, Keeper, whose penchant for napping on the family’s beds upstairs was not tolerated but nevertheless fondly recollected. On the other side, there was the strange dog, clearly in distress, perhaps thirsty, to whom Emily offered water one day as a child. The dog, rabid, bit her. Emily immediately strode into the kitchen, grabbed an iron that Tabby, the family cook, kept heated there, and cauterized her own wound. She told no one of the incident until much later, after the danger of infection had presumably passed.

  After Emily’s death, her sister Charlotte brought the incident into her novel Shirley. The bitten party became not a child but a young woman, the novel’s fierce and wealthy protagonist, Shirley Keeldar; the bite, and her concealment of it, becomes the pretext by which the headstrong Shirley softens her heart to marrying the penniless tutor Louis Moore, who has proposed to her. She fears that she will die, and she confesses this to Louis. As he comforts her with what today seems laughably false confidence (“I doubt whether the smallest particle of virus mingled with your blood: and if it did, let me assure you that—young, healthy, faultlessly sound as you are—no harm will ensue”), it is clear that Shirley’s resistance to his romantic advances has melted. Charlotte told one of her early biographers, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, that Shirley is as Emily “would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity.”*

  Of Charlotte’s four novels, fully two boast rabies subplots. In Shirley, as we have seen, the disease serves as pretext for a hard-edged woman to marry; in The Professor, it serves as shorthand for a father’s manly duty. The narrator (and professor of the title), William Crimsworth, describes his son by telling the story of when the boy’s mastiff, Yorke, was bitten by a rabid street dog. As soon as the elder Crimsworth discovers this fact, he immediately shoots Yorke dead, not knowing that the son is looking on in horror. The boy proceeds to make a spectacle of his grief for weeks, even prostrating himself out on the dog’s burial mound. Like Old Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird in our own time, The Professor uses rabies above all as a means to establish a man’s courage, to delineate his duty and his dominion.

  In many ways, though, it is Charlotte’s first and most famous novel, Jane Eyre, that captures best the zoonotic idea, the animalistic infection of which rabies serves as progenitor. When Jane becomes the employee, and later the fiancée, of Edward Rochester, her happiness and indeed her very life are threatened by a sinister presence in the attic, a madwoman whom we eventually learn to be Bertha Rochester, Edward’s violently insane wife. Bertha’s own brother, Richard Mason, is slashed and then savagely bitten by her in the night. Eventually, the creature appears to Jane in her room, soon before she herself is supposed to marry Edward. Jane recalls the encounter to him the following day:

  “It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!…[T]he lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?”

  “You may.”

  “Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.”

  Although Bertha Rochester is not, the reader soon discovers, in any way a supernatural being, she nevertheless places Jane Eyre squarely in the nineteenth-century genre of monster tales—stories of humans who are not entirely human, who are tinged (indeed cursed) with some element of the animal or the bestial. In his book Knowing Fear, the horror scholar Jason Colavito charts the nineteenth-century rise in literature of what he calls “biological horror,” featuring fully corporeal malefactors that “embody in their beings the struggle of humanity to re-imagine its relationship with the animal kingdom and the natural world.” Thus the emergence of the monster, the non-man man, “a bizarre liminal creature poised somewhere on the continuum between man and beast.”

  It would be too much to credit rabies alone with the nineteenth-century boom in monster lore. But the (trumped-up) threat of hydrophobia did foment, and in turn exploit, the same visceral fear: that any proper middle- or upper-class man or woman, refined above any condition of existence that one could possibly consider base or animalistic, might suddenly and through no fault of his or her own be gripped by an insensate and subhuman savagery. This fear was well captured in an 1830 letter to the London Times, addressed from Boodle’s, the tony gentlemen’s club on St. James’s Street, and genteelly bylined “A Constant Reader.” “Who,” asked this anonymous gentleman, during the height of that year’s rabies outbreak,

  is there among us—either at the east or west end of the town—that can leave his home in the morning, and say that he may not return in a few hours, brought back in a state that woul
d reduce him to the desperation and frenzy of a demon, and from which a horrible death can alone relieve him?

  The man’s unsubtle invocation of class (“at the east or west end”), nominally democratic, in fact serves the opposite function—pointing out that the most horrifying form of hydrophobia is the one that grips the man of means.

  It is no accident that the most hysteria-inducing monsters of the era, factual or fictional, clambered their terrifying forms out of polite society. It was important that Dracula, like Polidori’s Byronesque vampire, was an aristocrat in order for his murderous deeds to be truly chilling. The reader’s shock at the actions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde—“with ape-like fury,” for example, “trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered”—was secondary to her shock that he was, in fact, the genteel Dr. Jekyll. Much the same was true of the real-life legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, a cloaked marauder, widely believed to be a nobleman, who attacked at least two young women in the London suburbs in 1837 and then persisted for decades as an English bogeyman, widely seen but never captured. After breathing fire into his victim’s faces, he slashed at them with taloned hands and then escaped by leaping improbable distances.

  That such monstrous transformations could be effected in even the most refined gentleman made clear the ease with which they might also befall oneself; as the aforementioned French doctor, G. E. Fredet, put it about rabies: “Leaving to the patient all the faculties of his intelligence intact, he sees himself die.” Across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe revolutionized the horror genre in part through his chilling use of first-person narration in describing just these sorts of descents into subhuman madness. In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” the most chilling dimension of Poe’s murderous narrators is not the savagery of their crimes but the contrast between that savagery and their evident intellect, and the deterioration of that intellect in a way that strikes the literate reader as all too believable. “The Black Cat,” in particular, is a conjuring trick, a narrative that begins in the mode of a sedate personal memoir (“From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition”) but soon sinks slowly into deepening depredations. First, the narrator mutilates his cherished cat: “the fury of a demon instantly possessed me”—he might as well have said “frenzy”—as he cuts an eye from the yowling animal’s head. Then, as his madness deepens, and as his guilt over this misdeed compounds, he is driven (in “a rage more than demoniacal”) to murder his wife with an ax and wall up her corpse in the cellar. Again, as Ovid demonstrated in his retelling of Actaeon’s fate, the only thing more terrifying than the violence is a firsthand witnessing of the bestial metamorphosis that provoked it. These tales warn us that we are all vulnerable to the madness, capable of the savagery it inspires.

  As it happens, Poe himself descended into madness in the hours preceding his death. Found unconscious on the streets of Baltimore on October 3, 1849, he was brought to Dr. John J. Moran of the Baltimore City and Marine Hospital. Though Poe was known for trouble with alcohol, the driver who picked him up swore to Moran the fallen man did not smell of drink. Soon, the author began engaging in (as Moran later described it in a letter) “vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls”; Poe’s “face was pale and his whole person drenched in perspiration.” At times during his hospitalization, according to most accounts, Poe was calm and lucid. At others he was seized with “a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed.” Eventually, four days after admission, the great author expired.

  In 1996, on a lark, a doctor at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore decided to put the case of Poe’s death—stripped of his name and time period—before the center’s weekly pathology rounds. Unaware that the patient in question was Poe, a cardiologist named R. Michael Benitez developed a theory that the most likely cause of death was rabies. As Benitez notes, the attending physician reported no signs of trauma and mentioned none of the extreme fever that one would associate with malaria or yellow fever. Strangest of all was Poe’s cycle of relapsing, between periods of madness and periods of lucidity. The more obvious causes of death, especially the delirium tremens that might present in an alcoholic such as Poe, would have taken an inexorably progressive path, with his condition worsening steadily.

  Rabies sufferers, by contrast, are prone to just these sorts of swings between delirium and lucidity. It’s true that Moran made no mention of an animal bite, but as Benitez points out, of the thirty-three human rabies cases in the United States between 1977 and 1994, only nine presented with documented evidence of animal exposure. And the average number of days that neurological rabies sufferers survive is four: exactly the same number of days that elapsed between Poe’s arrival at the hospital and his demise.

  By the middle of the century, few physicians believed—as no less a figure than Benjamin Rush could in 1800—that humans sometimes acquired rabies spontaneously, without any contagion at all. But most doctors and veterinarians did still profess this belief about dogs. And to explain this supposed phenomenon, medical opinion had coalesced around a new, rather lurid theory: namely, that many if not most cases of dog rabies were caused by a lack of sexual satisfaction. The rise in pet keeping, in an era before the spay or neuter became common, focused nineteenth-century observers very uncomfortably on the unslaked sexual urges of their otherwise trustworthy companions. Dog owners confronted with the masculine fervor to mount during walks, or with the recurring frenzy of feminine heat, could be forgiven for later imagining that it was these unconsummated passions (and not the unseen nip from a stray in the streets) that had caused their pets to be seized by canine madness.

  Henry William Dewhurst, already a figure of murky scientific standing (by the 1840s he would be denounced in medical journals as an incorrigible quack), propounded this theory in a thoroughly dubious 1830 address to the London Veterinary Medical Society. To support his argument that rabies could be spontaneous, he relayed the details of two cases—a terrier confined by an old lady, and a doctor with a sporting hound—in which dogs displayed symptoms of rabies but then recovered. As for his theory that lack of sex was to blame, he fell back on a general observation that when the passion for sex “is unable to be gratified, as was intended by the great Author of nature, pure madness breaks out.” Here his lone example was the story of an elephant, kept in confinement, that had to be put down on account of its “unrestrained fury,” though he neglected even to specify how sex figured into the tale.

  Regardless, Dewhurst’s idea gained great purchase in Victorian England, and the French, perhaps predictably, agreed. In her splendid survey of nineteenth-century pet keeping in Paris, The Beast in the Boudoir, the historian Kathleen Kete cites one generally respected text from 1857 that posits sexual frustration as the sole cause of rabies in the dog. (Its authors, the doctors F. J. Bachelet and C. Froussart, lament that dogs do not have the same recourse to self-satisfaction that humans have.) That this theory had found purchase in Italy, too, is evidenced by an 1845 proposal, penned by a certain Monsignor Storti under the title “Project for the Prevention of Hydrophobia in Man,” detailing the creation of what can only be described as mandatory canine bordellos. Under this plan, each male dog would be brought to a central location for his urges to be gratified. Immediately afterward, he would be neutered and then sold. And then—presumably in order to keep these dogs from generating rabies eventually—all male dogs would be destroyed two years after their sale.*

  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, th
rough 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: