Rabid Read online

  Regardless, the Samhita is a stunning medical compendium for its time. Sus´ruta is best known to medical historians as the father of surgery, and indeed the Samhita documents a staggering array of procedures, from the nose job to the cesarean section. For the eye alone, Sus´ruta’s text includes eighteen chapters laying out some fifty-one different operations, many of them quite sophisticated in the details.

  The Samhita devotes nearly a thousand words to rabies, and based on the versions of the text that have been handed down, it correctly identifies many aspects of the disease. It recognizes that humans contract the disease and can be said to display comparable symptoms: “A person bitten by a rabid animal barks and howls like the animal by which he is bitten,” causing him to lose the “functions and faculties of a human subject.” The ancient Ayurvedans also claim the honor of being the first early medical scholars to isolate the phenomenon of hydrophobia itself and to recognize that a human illness progressing to that phase is invariably fatal: “If the patient in such a case becomes exceedingly frightened at the sight or mention of the very name of water, he should be understood to have been afflicted with Jala-trása [water-scare] and be deemed to have been doomed.” (The Samhita goes a bit too far, however, by claiming that Jala-trása is fatal even in patients who are merely frightened by reports of Jala-trása.)

  Although the disease is presented as an interaction of the “wind” of the human and the “phlegm” of the animal—Vāyu and Kapha, respectively, concepts that live on today in the practice of Ayurveda—the Samhita recognizes that rabies is fundamentally neurological in nature, and it also provides a fairly reliable description of rabies as it manifests in animals:

  The bodily Vāyu, in conjunction with the Kapha of a jackal, dog, wolf, bear, tiger or of any other such ferocious beast, affects the sensory nerves of these animals and overwhelms their instinct and consciousness. The tails, jaw-bones, and shoulders of such infuriated animals naturally droop down, attended with a copious flow of saliva from their mouths. The beasts in such a state of frenzy, blinded and deafened by rage, roam about and bite each other.

  Among the vaunted Greeks, the medical understanding of lyssa was not nearly so sophisticated. Reference to the disease does not appear explicitly in Hippocrates. Aristotle does address rabies directly in his treatise History of Animals, though he flubs it in nearly every respect. Dogs, he wrote with an odd confidence, suffer from only three diseases: lyssa, or rabies; cynanche, severe sore throat or tonsillitis; and podagra, or gout.* The philosopher also held the belief that rabies could not be contracted by humans: “Rabies drives the animal mad, and any animal whatever, excepting man, will take the disease if bitten by a dog so afflicted; the disease is fatal to the dog itself, and to any animal it may bite, man excepted.” (Aristotle added that the elephant, generally thought then to be immune to disease, “is occasionally subject to flatulency.”)

  In the first two centuries A.D., during roughly the same period that Sus´ruta (if the consensus estimates are true) was practicing his surgical wonders, the Greco-Roman tradition of medicine did begin to develop a comparably sophisticated understanding of rabies. This awareness begins with Aulus Cornelius Celsus, believed to have been born in around 25 B.C. and to have written during the early part of the first century. Almost nothing is known of Celsus’s life, in a civilization that took great pains to document the lives of men it considered sufficiently worthy. Pliny the Elder, the first-century historian and naturalist, believed that Celsus lived in the southern part of France, based on his reference to a vine that was native to that region. Celsus seems to have been not a physician but an encyclopedist who compiled his De medicina largely from the Greeks. But while his notes on hydrophobia go well beyond the silence of Hippocrates and the complete misapprehension of Aristotle, they are hardly more incisive. He does recognize the existence of hydrophobia (“a most distressing disease, in which the patient is tortured simultaneously by thirst and by dread of water”) and pays at least lip service to the fact that “in these cases there is very little help for the sufferer.” His description of the malady ends there, though, and the balance of his account is given over to an elaborate and darkly amusing series of treatments—more on which later.

  It was a hundred years or so after Celsus that a school of scientific thought emerged to spur the classical tradition toward a better understanding not just of rabies but of medicine as a whole. Hoping to escape the intellectual strictures of the empiricists—who rejected not only experimentation but all theoretical approaches to medicine, holding that physicians should work based only on what they could perceive with the naked eye—these scholars called themselves the methodists, and they put forward a positive theory of how the human body functioned. That their theory (which involved conceiving of diseases as “affections” and considering their effects holistically) strikes the contemporary mind as largely nonsensical seems to have been beside the point. The methodists’ focus on improving therapy invigorated the whole enterprise of writing and thinking about human health.

  The founder of the methodist school, Themison (first century B.C.), and one of his disciples, Eudemus, were both said to have survived attacks by rabid dogs; and either might have been the original author of an anonymous methodist text, usually dated to the first century A.D., that touches on rabies at length. More impressive still are the notes on hydrophobia made by Soranus, a methodist physician (first or second century A.D.) from Ephesus, on the western shore of what is now Turkey. Best known today for his prescient thoughts on gynecology, Soranus also left behind—in his treatises on acute and chronic diseases, which survive in a full Latin translation made by Caelius Aurelianus during the fifth century—a few fairly lengthy sections on hydrophobia and its treatment. Unlike most of his predecessors, Soranus recognized that contact with rabid animals is the only means by which hydrophobia spreads. He even gives a seemingly far-fetched example that in fact might be possible, given what we know today about the disease:

  And once when a seamstress was preparing to patch a cloak rent by the bites of a rabid animal, she adjusted the threads along the end, using her tongue, and then as she sewed she licked the edges that were being joined, in order to make the passage of the needle easier. It is reported that two days later she was stricken by rabies.

  One gathers that Soranus is drawing upon close observation of quite a few rabies sufferers, given his thorough and plausible list of symptoms, which includes not just revulsion at water but rapid and irregular pulse, fever, incontinence, shaking, and—noted for the first time—involuntary ejaculation. He correctly rebukes an earlier writer for having claimed the disease can sometimes progress over the course of years. He even rebuffs Eudemus, Themison’s successor, for his idea that melancholy and hydrophobia were one and the same. “The victims of hydrophobia die quickly,” Soranus writes, “for it is not only an acute disease but one that is unremitting.”

  Throughout this vast expanse of history, the constant threat of rabies—rare yet tinged with horror—served as merely another wrinkle in early civilization’s intimate, complex relationship with the dog. By this point dogs had been domesticated (or had domesticated themselves, as most scholars now believe) for at least ten thousand years, and yet their role in society was profoundly dissonant. Based on findings of teeth and bones around Mesopotamian sites, archaeologists have concluded that semi-feral dogs roamed cities as scavengers, feeding on trash. Yet many dogs were companions, for whose actions a human was responsible, as the Laws of Eshnunna attest. Alongside the other attendant advances of civilization, such as the city and the written word, reliable breeding of dogs first emerged during this period: remains of sight hounds—a purebred line of dogs that persists to this day in such graceful runners as greyhounds, whippets, and salukis—have been found in the region dating back as far as 3500 B.C. Dogs also figured prominently in the spiritual symbology of early Mesopotamia. In a curious connection to our joke, the dog seems to have been most invoked as the symbol of Gula, the spirit
of healing; when archaeologists excavated her temple at Isin, the very same one over which the high priest is said to have presided, they found it studded with dog figurines. Later, King Nebuchadnezzar II, writing in roughly 600 B.C., records that dog statuettes made of precious metals were left at Gula’s temple in Babylon.

  And so dogs occupied the lowest and yet also the highest rungs in the bestiary of early man: pitiful scavenger of garbage but also huntmate, totem, friend. It is a dual nature that persists into the present day, as one can vividly witness on the streets of any developing-world city, where the collared and the bathed uneasily coexist with the unkept and the unkempt. It is also a bifurcation that dates all the way back to the beginning of dog history, to the very first creatures to earn the name Canis familiaris. Scientists theorize that the indispensable hearth of domestication was the human garbage pile, with the wolves that scavenged there some fifteen thousand years ago becoming gradually more tame. By studying the mitochondrial DNA of various dogs from around the world, geneticists have tracked the site of this domestication to southern China—which means that, based on local traditions and archaeological records, the first dogs may have been bred for use as food. Dog bones found by archaeologists in that region are often scarred with knife marks.

  Nevertheless, the dog almost immediately became something more. The uncanny ability of dogs to pick up on human moods and needs is almost certainly instinctive rather than bred, so we can imagine the slow courtship of human and beast as it would have played out over centuries. Without even having to be captured or trained, some tamed dogs would have begun to function as guard animals, alerting humans to potential intrusion, protecting food and other possessions from outside assault. Soon, with training, these ur-pets would have been hunting, pulling sleds, and, eventually, herding livestock—man and dog, creating civilization as one.

  Yet the hand that feeds the dog has forever been not merely bitten by it but, on occasion, devoured. In rabies, after all, every dog has a dark side lurking behind the soulful eyes; and even a healthy dog seldom hesitates to feast on the corpse of a dead human, even that of a former friend or master. In ancient India, the ambivalence toward dogs was eloquently expressed in one sacred text called the NisīhaCuū, which says that gods “come to the world of men in the shape of yaksas, dogs, that is. They are worshipped when they do good, and not, when they do not.” Indian literature itself is rife with images of dogs as battlefield scavengers; in one sacred text, hell is portrayed as a place where malign rulers are devoured by 720 dogs with fangs of steel. And yet dogs were kept as pets and bred by the elite, and the favors of a dog were sometimes auspicious. “If a dog comes face-to-face with [a man] in a joyous mood,” noted one ancient work, “frolicking and rolling on the ground in front of him, then…there will be a great gain of wealth [when he] starts on a journey.”

  Nowhere was the dichotomy in the dog starker than among the ancient Egyptians, whose highest god was the dog god Anubis and who bred graceful sight hounds—the lithe form of which is believed by some to survive to the present day in our pharaoh hounds. An excavated tomb at Abydos, dating to 3300 B.C., built during the pre-pharaonic Upper Kingdom for an unknown ruler, shows evidence of the ritual burial of dogs, which would become a common practice in Egypt. A tomb at Hierakonpolis from approximately the same time (discovered during the late nineteenth century but then lost) was illustrated in full color with a hunting scene, complete with hounds, and contained the remains of multiple domesticated dogs; excavation of the tomb of Queen Herneith, who ruled a few hundred years later, found the skeleton of her dog stretched across the entrance to her tomb, guarding her home in the afterlife. In art, hounds were often depicted on leashes and as widely present in human society; ancient Egypt was a dog’s paradise, a place where (if we are to believe Herodotus) the death of a pet dog would prompt its owner to shave not just his head but his entire body.

  And yet even in Egypt, semi-feral dogs posed a constant threat in the streets of towns and villages; in The Book of the Dead, dogs are alluded to in one appeal by the deceased narrator to Ra, the sun deity, against a force that “carries off souls, who gulps down decayed matter, who lives on carrion, who is attached to darkness and dwells in gloom, of whom the feeble are afraid.” References to dogs as scavengers in Egypt are found not just in the Hebrew Bible’s accounts but in papyri documenting the Roman era there.

  Like the Egyptians, the Greeks loved their graceful hunting hounds and considered them loyal friends and companions. A new literary genre, the cynegeticon, sprang up in ancient Greece to extol the hound and to prescribe its proper breeding and care. The most prominent (and likely first) of these guidebooks was penned by the soldier-historian Xenophon, who himself had witnessed the power of lyssa during a military campaign: of a fleeing enemy he wrote, with a hint of boast, “They were afraid that some lyssa, like that of dogs, had seized our men.” After he was exiled from Athens to the Peloponnesian town of Scillus, Xenophon spent his postmilitary years in a happy reverie of hunting and writing, pursuits that converged in his Cynegeticus. He describes his ideal hounds in sumptuous detail: flat and muscular head, small thin ears, long straight tail, sparkling black eyes; the forelegs “short, straight, round and firm”; the hips “round and fleshy at the back, not close at the top, and smooth on the inside”; the hind legs “much longer than the forelegs and slightly bent.” Profound respect suffuses every line of the Cynegeticus. Xenophon chastens the hunter not to employ collars that might chafe the dog’s coat. He prescribes the praise that should be showered upon the hounds while they chase the hare. “Now, hounds, now!” one is enjoined to shout. “Well done! Bravo, hounds! Well done, hounds!”*

  Nevertheless, scavenging dogs also roamed Greek fields and towns, carrying upon them the stench of death. The Iliad invokes the dog perhaps twenty times as a devourer of corpse flesh, the first instance occurring in the second sentence of the epic’s very first stanza: “Many a brave soul did [the anger of Achilles] send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures.” Hector’s father, the old king Priam, captures the sad irony of the fate that lies in store for him as he contemplates his imminent death at the hand of Achilles. “My dogs in front of my doorway,” he foretells,

  will rip me raw, after some man with stroke of the sharp bronze

  spear, or with spearcast, has torn the life out of my body;

  those dogs I raised in my halls to be at my table, to guard my

  gates, who will lap my blood in the savagery of their anger

  and then lie down in my courts. For a young man all is decorous

  when he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there

  dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful;

  but when an old man is dead and down, and the dogs mutilate

  the grey head and the grey beard and the parts that are secret,

  this, for all sad mortality, is the sight most pitiful.

  The word “dog” was also hurled as an epithet to decry the shameless man or woman; The Iliad finds Iris slinging it at Athena and Helen of Troy applying it ruefully to herself.

  Beyond the dog’s fondness for corpse flesh, it also could succumb at any time (literally or metaphorically) to the frenzied madness of lyssa. One need look no further than the mythic fate of Actaeon, the hunter whose severe misfortune it is to stumble across Diana, goddess of the hunt, as she bathes in the woods. To punish him, she turns him into a stag, prompting a second, bestial transformation that causes his death: his own beloved hounds, seized by lyssa at the sight of his new form, set upon him and tear him limb from limb.

  Ovid, in the Metamorphoses—an all-encompassing volume about human-to-animal transformations—renders both transitions with awful acuity, allowing us to experience both from inside the hunter’s still-human consciousness. Actaeon realizes he has become a stag only when he witnesses his reflection in a pool. “Poor me!” he tries to exclaim at the sight but manages onl
y to emit a groan, and thereby learns that groaning, for him, “was now speech.” His body has become alien to him—“tears streamed down cheeks that were no longer his”—even as his mind is left untouched, permitting him to grasp the full horror of his situation.

  Almost immediately thereafter come the hounds, formerly his charges but now his pursuers, “rushing at him like a storm.” His conscious mind lingers on each of them, one by one, noting their names and, at times, an endearing bit of detail that only an owner could know: Speedy and Wolf are siblings, while Shepherdess leads two puppies from a recent litter; Sylvia has “lately been gored by a boar.” Some thirty-five dogs are noted by name, with “many more too numerous to mention,” all dogs he has raised and fed; now they charge toward him in a slavering mob, “out to taste his blood.” It is hard to know which of these twinned faces of lyssa is more horrible, in either Ovid’s reckoning or ours: the human becoming animal, or the hunter being hunted by his own treasured dogs.

  Perhaps the most enduring ancient symbol of the dog’s two warring natures is Cerberus, that terrifying watchdog whose vigilant gaze and fearsome jaws kept the dead from escaping Hades and returning to the world of the living. Descriptions of his physiology vary significantly in the different retellings—his heads number two, sometimes three, sometimes fifty, or even a hundred; his tail is that of a snake, or not; snake heads sometimes sprout from his head and neck like a gruesome mane. But despite all these monstrous innovations he is consistently described as a dog. A “cursed” or “dreaded” or “savage” dog he may be, but he remains a dog nonetheless, the unmistakable kin of those that walk the earth and lick its inhabitants. He could even be a good dog, at times. As described by Hesiod, Cerberus was quite friendly to the dying, at least when they arrived; he positively welcomed them, in fact, “with actions of his tail and both ears.” It was only when they attempted to pass back into life that he would set upon them savagely, even devour them. Death is a boundary that can be freely crossed in only one direction, and so guarding that boundary is a perfect role for a dog: natural friend on the one hand—or head; savage attacker and corpse devourer on the other; both natures cohabiting inside one vexing four-footed form.