'Rabid' finds this potent cultural strain examined in such diverse works as 'Wuthering Heights,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' vampire images by Goya and Blake, and the 'Twilight' books and films. More broadly, 'the distinction between the familiar, domesticated pet and the ungovernable wild animal came to be seen as analogous to that between civilized and savage races.' The dog's double nature, as both man's loyal domesticated companion and a beast with 'a dark side lurking behind the soulful eyes' has given rabies its unsettling reverberations through the centuries. The trail leads on to Mesopotamia, an ancient Indian medical text, China, Egypt, Europe in the Middle Ages and beyond. They begin with the Trojan War, where lyssa - a primal rage with etymological roots in Greek for both wolf and rabies - drives Hector into his battlefield fury. Wasik and Murphy cast a wide and skillfully woven net. Even a chapter titled 'The Survivors,' which recounts the ultimately successful ordeal of a Wisconsin teenager infected by a bat bite in church in 2004, has a grueling intensity. The course of an infection is grim, with its stealthily delayed onset, horror-show hydrophobia, fever, pain, hallucinations and awful spasms. Despite an effective and widely used vaccine, 55,000 people still die annually from rabies, most of them in Asia and Africa. Both the menace and meanings of the disease build inexorably.

Tacking gracefully from case histories to the ancient Egyptians' view of the dog, from bats to Bali, microbiology to vampire novels, 'Rabid' moves with the supple efficiency of its subject. 'As the lone visible instance of animal-to-human infection, rabies has always shaded into something more supernatural: into bestial metamorphoses, into monstrous hybridities.' Not only is rabies especially lethal and all but unique among viruses for traveling through the nervous system, as the authors show, it also arrives with a haunting means of transmission. It's a smart, unsettling and strangely stirring piece of work. Oakland writers Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy mount a persuasively argued case for the importance of rabies as both a daunting public health issue, past and present, and a persistent source of deep-rooted terror. Surely there are other viruses, other maladies with a more urgent claim on our attention.īut in this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system. By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (Viking 275 pages $25.95)Īll but eradicated in the Western world, rabies does not present the most obviously pressing topic for a cultural history.

Rabid bill wasik