Epidemics of Fear

Abstract

Epidemics of Fear Catherine McNeur (bio) Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xix + 322. Figures, notes, appendix, index. $54.95. The nineteenth-century author and social reformer Lydia Maria Child arrived in New York City in the summer of 1841 as she began to draft what would become Letters from New York. She traipsed all over the city, visiting parks and churches, comparing everything to her hometown of Boston. She admired the landscaping of the new parks, the carefully trimmed hedges, the green lawns, the little "shaded alcoves of lattice-work, where one can eat an ice cream." With the leisure of existing in the city primarily to observe and with no particular place to go, she was able to celebrate being blocked from crossing the street by a slow-moving temperance parade, with drums pounding and pro-water, anti-alcohol banners flapping in the wind. She found so much to love about the bustle of New York.1 However, there was ugliness too and not just in the thick, putrid filth that coated the paved streets. Though Child tried to focus mostly on the beauty of the city, she felt compelled to write about the dog-killers, made up of boys and men alike, who prowled with their "bloody clubs, and splattered garments" and led her to avert her eyes when she heard them coming. So far that summer, bounty hunters had killed nearly 1,500 dogs. Rabies outbreaks, both real and imagined, fueled the government-sponsored dog-killing sprees like the one in 1841. There were an uncountable number of loose dogs on the streets—some owned but set out to roam, others feral—and the possibility of pedestrians being bitten was very real. "The safety of the city doubtless requires their expulsion," Child wrote, "but the manner of it strikes me as exceedingly cruel and demoralizing." She reported that "the poor creatures are knocked down on the pavement, and beat to death. Sometimes they are horribly maimed, and run howling and limping away." Decades before the ASPCA was founded, Child and others were calling out the cruelty they witnessed, worried about the consequences it might have for American culture. In arguments that would be repeated by those concerned about violent video games since the 1990s, Child and other social commentators wondered if [End Page 380] children who saw these brutal events might themselves become brutal. She seemed to imply that witnessing the violence was almost as dangerous as contracting rabies itself.2 In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920, Jessica Wang writes a biography of rabies in New York. The goals of animal rights activists, journalists, politicians, physicians, scientists, loose dogs, and dog bite victims collided as New Yorkers and the world tried to understand how the disease worked and how they might take control of the situation. This is a story about how a fast-growing city became a hotbed for rabies, how an uncontrolled dog population amplified fears of infections, and how the transforming medical profession tried to make sense of it all. I sat down to read Mad Dogs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with a four-month-old puppy barking in the background. Even if I had not primed to look for them, it would have been hard not to see parallels with our current crisis. I needed to get my puppy vaccinated for rabies while a persistent racoon simultaneously scouted for real estate on my block. Rabies, in short, has been on my mind, though the threat pales in comparison to the corona-virus. Rabies, or hydrophobia as it was sometimes called, has never come close to comparing with the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus. The culprits are also different: the dangerous villains in the rabies outbreaks were dogs foaming at the mouth eager to attack, not an invisibly contaminated doorknob or a passing grocery shopper's uncovered cough. Still, there are things that feel familiar in this older story. An epidemic of fear, after all, breaks out...