That it was often dogs doing the infecting only added to the disease’s mythological power.
Today we know that many of our most feared diseases originated in animals and made the jump to humans-think AIDS, Ebola, and avian and swine flu, to name a few-but until germ theory was developed in the nineteenth century and refined in the twentieth, rabies was the only obvious instance of animals making humans sick. Notwithstanding its 100 percent fatality rate, Wasik and Murphy argue that rabies is uniquely terrifying because it “challenges the boundary of humanity itself.” Transmitted through a bite, rabies releases the monster within the animal and the animal within the human, causing feverish hallucinations, involuntary orgasms, an intensely physical revulsion to water, and, before Pasteur developed his vaccine, an excruciating, inevitable death. Rabies is the dark side of domestication, always potentially lurking behind the eyes of the animals that live beside us. Rather, if one of the assistants was bitten, his colleagues were under orders to shoot him in the head.Īs Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy document in their new book Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, the horror of rabies has been with us since the beginning of human civilization. The risk of losing control of these animals loomed large, but the bullets in the revolver weren’t intended for the dogs. As part of their research, Pasteur and his assistants routinely pinned down rabid dogs and collected vials of their foamy saliva.
Since the infectious agent-later identified as a virus-was too small to be isolated at the time, the only way to study the disease was to keep a steady of supply of infected animals in the basement of the Parisian lab. Their boss, who was already famous for his revolutionary work on food safety, had turned his attention to rabies. In the late nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur’s laboratory assistants made sure to always have a loaded gun on hand.
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