Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik Read Free Book Online

hard to distinguish real cases of hydrophobia from hysterical ones, which were common right up to the twentieth century. Worse, because of the relative paucity of cases, ancient medical scholars often compiled alleged cures from second- and thirdhand reports.
    For all of these reasons we should forgive, at least to a point, the extraordinary nonsense that passed for rabies treatment in the ancient world. Let’s begin with bite treatment. Here again the
Sus´ruta samhita
deserves the most respect. Not only does it acknowledge, without wavering, the fatality of hydrophobia, but it prescribes a treatment for rabid bites—bleeding and cauterization of the wound—that is as sensible as any. (Also as delicious as any: the
Samhita
recommends cauterizing with clarified butter, which the patient is then invited to drink. Italso prescribes a sesame paste for the wound and advises that the patient be fed a special fire-baked cake made of rice, roots, and leaves. The Varanasian patient did not face death on an empty stomach.)
    In ancient China, where mentions of rabies in extant texts are relatively spare, the disease does appear in Ge Hong’s “Handy Therapies for Emergencies,” from the third century A.D. Ge prescribes “moxibustion” for the wound, a process that involved burning mugwort, a species of wormwood, and applying it to the bitten region. This was likely to have been more effective, or at least to do less harm, than another of his recommendations: to kill the offending dog, remove its brain, and rub that on the wound.
    Among the Greco-Romans, perhaps we should not be surprised that Celsus, the encyclopedist, drawing as he did on many different sources, some of uncertain provenance, should supply us with a far more varied list of dog-bite treatments. These include bleeding and cauterization, but also the application of salt, or even a brine pickle, to the wound. Some physicians, he says, send their patients to a steam bath, “there to sweat as much as their bodily strength allows, the wound being kept open in order that the poison may drop out freely from it.” After that, the doctors pour wine into the bite. “When this has been carried out for three days,” Celsus says, “the patient is deemed to be out of danger.”
    Things totter off the rails with Pliny the Elder. As with Ge Hong, Pliny’s thoughts tend to involve using the animal to treat the man. His best-known cure—to “insert in the wound ashes of hairs from the tail of the dog that inflicted the bite”—lives on today in our expression “hair of the dog,” referring to a not-quite-so-dubious hangover remedy. But Pliny thought that a maggot from any dead dog’s carcass would do the trick, as would a linen cloth soaked with the menstrual blood of a female dog. Or the rabid dog’s head could be burned to ashes, and the ashes applied to the wound; or the head could just be eaten outright.
    Still not see a treatment that works for you? Let Dr. Pliny lay out some more options:
    There is a small worm in a dog’s tongue…: if this is removed from the animal while a pup, it will never become mad or lose its appetite. This worm, after being carried thrice round a fire, is given to persons who have been bitten by a mad dog, to prevent them from becoming mad. This madness, too, is prevented by eating a cock’s brains; but the virtue of these brains lasts for one year only, and no more. They say, too, that a cock’s comb, pounded, is highly efficacious as an application to the wound; as also, goose-grease, mixed with honey. The flesh also of a mad dog is sometimes salted, and taken with the food, as a remedy for this disease. In addition to this, young puppies of the same sex as the dog that has inflicted the injury, are drowned in water, and the person who has been bitten eats their liver raw. The dung of poultry, provided it is of a red colour, is very useful, applied with vinegar; the ashes, too, of the tail of a shrew-mouse, if the animal has