Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Britain eradicated rabies (hydrophobia in its human form) in 1902. Even at its height rabies was of minimal statistical importance in terms of human mortality. At its peak, in 1877, it caused only 79 deaths. Between 1837 and 1899, when the last known death from the indigenous disease occurred in South Wales, it took as few as 1,225 lives—and some contemporaries regarded even this figure as exaggerated. Such numbers barely register in comparison with tuberculosis, which carried off Victorians by the million. Pemberton and Worboys argue, however, that in nineteenth-century England, which is their book's main focus, the significance of rabies went far beyond the statistical. Partly because it was the ‘worst of all possible deaths’ and partly because it was transmissible between brute creation and humans, rabies vied with cholera and anthrax as the most feared disease of the age. It featured in the works of Emily Bronte, R.D. Blackmore, and Arthur Conan Doyle; was linked mysteriously with the dog days of summer and the movements of heavenly bodies; and generated heated scientific debate about causation, treatment, and spontaneous generation. The cry of ‘mad dog’ could provoke furious pursuits through towns, villages, and countryside, by murderous crowds armed with flails, shovels, pitchforks, and even guns, bent upon canine destruction. The following days might see organised slaughter on the grand scale: around 1,000 dogs, most of them doubtless healthy, were destroyed on the streets of Liverpool over a few days in 1864 during one of the city's ‘mad dog crusades’

Ancient history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Rabies · Smallpox · Sociology · Vaccination · Demography · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Medicine · Rabies epidemiology and control · Virology