Rabid (13 page)

By the early nineteenth century, tales of vampire bats circulated widely in the English-speaking world. J. G. Stedman, in a 1796 account of his years in Suriname, describes his encounter with a blood-feeding bat in fantastical terms. “On waking about four o’clock this morning in my hammock,” he writes,

Around the same time, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya was using spectral, bat-like figures to symbolize vampiric forces. Great shadowy bats hover above a slumped figure of Reason, in
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
and also, in
There Is Plenty to Suck,
behind three murderous hags as they prepare to consume a basketful of babies. His
Los caprichos
illustrates a series of vampire-like figures in the act of devouring sleeping innocents. In 1804, William Blake depicted a vampire bat in two engravings accompanying his poem
Jerusalem
to symbolize what he calls the Spectre—the divisive and annihilating energies that cannibalize the human psyche. But it took scientists until 1810 to provide a description of the hematophagous (that is, bloodsucking) bat. Even in 1839, when Charles Darwin commented on the feeding habits of a
Desmodus
bat during his travels aboard the
Beagle,
he noted that the “whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one…was actually caught on a horse’s back.”

It was left to the British vampire novel to formalize the relationship between the undead creature and its Latin American namesake. The eventual cover of James Malcolm Rymer’s
Varney the Vampyre,
which began as a horror serial that ran between 1845 and 1847, sported four Satan-headed bats, hovering menacingly around the skeletally dapper Sir Varney as he stands poised to sup at the throat of the raven-haired beauty drowsing beneath him. And then Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
in 1897, made the connection unequivocal, with the count’s presence often signaled by his bat rather than by his human form. Ever since, the fictionalized vampire has traveled in the abundant company of bats, whether in novels, in Hollywood, or on
Sesame Street
—though in that last instance, the number of bats can always be readily counted.

*
Strange as this might seem to us today, a poodle appears frequently as the demon dog in old folktales. This association dates back at least to Goethe’s
Faust,
which has Mephistopheles appearing to Faust in the form of a black poodle, which takes up residence with him and consistently interrupts whenever he tries to translate the Bible. When Faust tries to kick his new dog out, it reveals its true nature to him:

In length and breadth how doth my poodle grow!

…

Huge as a hippopotamus,

With fiery eye, terrific tooth!

Ah! now I know thee, sure enough!

Freemasons, too, were thought to have sold their souls to the devil, who would attend their meetings in the form of a black poodle.

A New York City policeman shoots a rabid dog on Broadway. From
Harper’s Weekly
, 1879.

I
n 1847, the American evangelist Alexander Campbell traveled through Europe, sending home sporadic reports to be published in the monthly magazine he founded, entitled the
Millennial Harbinger
. In the northern wilds of Scotland, Campbell came across a melancholy scene, which he painted with a sensitivity and delicacy befitting a man of the cloth. On his long journey from Aberdeen to Banff, he stopped to visit the lovingly cultivated but nearly uninhabited estate of James Duff, fourth Earl of Fife, who lived there at the musty old age of seventy-one without family and with few servants. A nocturnal creature in this enormous, unfinished castle, Duff typically awoke at five in the afternoon and returned to his bed by five in the morning. “One cannot conceive,” Campbell wrote, “why he should live in the midst of such fine gardens and groves, ornamented with beautiful walks, summer-houses, alcoves; bowers, jetteaus, &c., as environ his splendid residence, to be surveyed by himself for an hour or two in the evening of the day.” But, the pastor allowed, Duff did have one reasonable excuse. Forty-two years beforehand, his wife—the former Maria Caroline Manners, a legendary beauty—had died at the age of thirty,
just six years after their marriage, leaving him no children. The cause was “the canine madness”; she was “bitten by her own rabid lap-dog.”

One can hardly blame Duff for failing to recover or remarry. His wife’s death in 1805 had left Edinburgh startled and not a small measure scandalized, as much for its peculiar beginnings as for its horrific conclusion. At some point during the previous year, four dogs of the Duff family had suffered bites from a rabid attacker. Three of these dogs belonged to the earl and were immediately put down. But the lady could not bear to lose her own lapdog, a French poodle named Pompey—a fitting allusion, it would seem, to unforeseen disaster. The creature was spared, but it proved to be a tragic pardon.

Many months later, the fateful symptoms began to appear in the lapdog and then, sometime later, in the lap’s owner. Rumor had it that to end her agonizing spasms, it was necessary to smother the splendid lady to death, though her doctors later insisted this had not been the case. Known to all as a dazzling beauty, Mrs. Duff was subsequently memorialized in a popular engraving, well trafficked for decades afterward, that showed the young lady stepping atop the crest of a globe, bearing aloft a sash and attended by cherubs whose presence connoted an ascent (as one admirer noted years after her death) to “another, and a better world.”

The precise mode of transmission remains disputed to this day. Soon after the event, the general opinion was that Pompey had nipped her on the tip of the nose. One Edinburgh wag, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, quipped that “no nose was so much talked of since the days of Tristram’s Don Diego” and went on to describe the town’s general uproar:

But later there seems to have been a consensus, developed among doctors, that the poodle was innocent of even a bite and that its friendly licks alone had spread the dreaded disease. An 1830 paper in the
Lancet
laid out this particular theory in detail. “She had a small pimple on her chin, of which she had rubbed off the top,” wrote William Lawrence, one of the journal’s founders; “and allowing the dog to indulge in its usual caresses, it licked this pimple, of which the surface was exposed.” Subsequent reports (perhaps following Lawrence) also specifically cited a pimple as having been the aperture to infection.

True or false, this invocation of unseemly acne on the fair Mrs. Duff’s visage also comported with the general disapproval, among nineteenth-century medical men, of the intimate canine congress to which lapdoggery led. The act of allowing a cur to lick a human face was, to their minds, the height of uncleanliness. “Not only a most disgusting, but a dangerous practice,” intoned one medical author, in discussing the Duff case; another called it “degrading” and “reprehensible” and went so far as to say, “I unequivocally condemn an indiscriminate attachment to, or imprudent fondling of dogs.”

In their scorn, these men of science were responding to a genuine sea change in the way pets, and in particular dogs, were regarded in the industrializing precincts of Europe and the United States. With the rise of a middle class, no longer tied to farms and their necessarily instrumental approach to animals, the treasured, pampered pet no longer figured as merely a luxury of the upper classes. In 1840s Paris, whose human population was just shy of a million, there were believed to be some 100,000 pet dogs. The nineteenth century saw the rise of dog shows (with more than three hundred held each year in England by century’s end) and “dog fancy” in general, a practice that could be joined even by those of modest means. Ever more citizens during the sweep of this century found themselves inclined to agree with Lord
Byron’s epitaph for his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain: “To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; I never met but one—and here he lies.” (Boatswain expired from rabies in 1808, at which time Byron had him interred on the grounds of Newstead Abbey, the family’s ancestral home; three years later, Byron specified in his will that he be buried at Boatswain’s side, though this instruction was later countermanded.)

This transformation in pet-keeping was taking place at the same time that Europeans, with the increase in literacy and the explosion of the press, began to learn more about life in their ever-expanding colonies. Perhaps inevitably, the distinction between the familiar, domesticated pet and the ungovernable wild animal came to be seen as analogous to that between civilized and savage races. When Charles Darwin, in his 1868 treatise on domestication, remarked upon the tendency of half-bred animals to revert to a wild nature, he compared this to “the degraded state and savage disposition of crossed races of man” and approvingly quoted an assessment made to the famed Dr. Livingstone by a Zambezi native in Africa: “God made white men, and God made black men, but the Devil made half-castes.” With animals as with man, domestication and fine breeding were seen to bestow a moral as well as a physical fitness.

By insinuating itself into domestic tranquillity—by effecting the fall of Pompey, as it were—rabies presented itself as a shocking subversion of this order. As such, it became an object of disproportionate panic throughout the nineteenth century. Reports of allegedly mad dogs studded the newspapers. Stories of actual hydrophobic expiry were granted full columns stuffed with florid detail. Neighborhood councils formed to beat back the scourge of feral dogs, even as tuberculosis and cholera cut wide and far more fatal swaths through their same streets. As the historian Harriet Ritvo has pointed out, a person of that era (in England, at least) was ten times more likely to die of even murder than of rabies. But a death at the hand of man seemed far less horrible to contemplate than one suffered in the jaws of the devil.

Compounding the terror was the fact that science understood rabies little better at the start of the nineteenth century than it did at the end of the second. Good old Soranus of Ephesus, as handed down to us by Caelius Aurelianus, had a more sensible take on the causes and nature of hydrophobia than did many medical men of 1800. When Benjamin Rush, one of the United States’ most esteemed doctors and medical authors of revolutionary times, published his thoughts on the disease near the turn of the century, he began with a list of twenty-one supposed causes of hydrophobia, and the bite of a rabid animal did, mercifully, place first. But the balance of the list included “cold night air,” “eating beech nuts,” “a fall,” and “an involuntary association of ideas.” Seventeen centuries after Soranus and Sus´ruta had each succeeded in largely differentiating rabies from other maladies—not fully, to be sure, and not quite with rigor, but nevertheless judiciously—medicine was once again having difficulty in doing so.