La rage and the bourgeoisie: the cultural context of rabies in the French 19th century.

Abstract

RABIES KILLS BY ATTACKING the central nervous system. As medical textbooks today explain it, rabies is an acute viral disease. Infection occurs when the virus is introduced into the system from an open wound, ordinarily through a bite. The virus travels along nerve tissue to the brain. The incubation period is highly variable but lasts on average from four to eight weeks. prodromal period, preceding clinical disease, is marked by fever, headache, malaise, nausea and vomiting, and other indeterminate symptoms. Excitation and agitation characterize the onset of the encephalitic phase, followed by confusion, hallucinations, combativeness, bizarre aberrations of thought, and various seizures and muscle spasms. Hyperesthesia is common, and hydrophobia appears in about half of the cases. Priapism and spontaneous ejaculation are possible. Death follows these symptoms by a few days.' Rabies is a fatal disease, but, as the most superficial investigation will reveal, its rate of incidence is woefully inadequate to account for pre-Pasteurian fears. Fewer than twenty-five people died of rabies per annum in France during the period 1850-72, according to statistics compiled by the Comite consultatif d'hygiene publique,2 but contemporary attitudes, intensely phobic as they were, would seem to bear little relationship to these figures.3 Informed commentators did indeed dwell on this surprising aspect of the disease: A horrifying disease, fortunately very rare, despite the commotion it makes, wrote the author of of the more popular dog care books of the century.4 Although relatively uncommon, rabies, prominent veterinarian noted, is one of those diseases that frighten us the most.5 But despite these learned warnings, fear of rabies became positively obsessive for those unfortunates who were bitten by dogs suspected of being diseased. For them, life became a sleepless hell of anxiety, a dread anticipation of the appearance of symptoms that would confirm one's inexorable movement toward death.6 Even a lick could elicit a doubt, and the tiniest scratch could cause alarm.7 The client of another prominent Parisian veterinarian believed he had caught the disease from a handkerchief contaminated by his rabid dog's saliva.8 Fear of rabies could result in hysterical symptoms notoriously difficult to dis-