As prior, this is the original review I submitted on 03/07/08.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain 1830-2000
Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys
Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007
1830 saw the publication of the veterinarian William Youatt's pamphlet On Canine Madness, firmly stating that rabies was a specific and contagious disease spread only by the bite of an infected animal. 1830 also saw a "great and almost universal alarm" about rabies that lead one correspondent of the then Home Secretary, Robert Peel, to characterise the summer weeks as an "'Era Of Canine Madness.'"
Tensions between the nascent veterinary profession and the more established medical profession, and the plethora of lay remedies – every town and district had its own remedy – complicated official responses. Youatt and other progressive veterinarians and doctors were at odds with the prevailing medical orthodoxy on rabies. A distinction was drawn between rabies in dogs and hydrophobia in humans, and much debate was concerned with clarifying the nature of the disease. For much of the period covered by this book, there were many forms of rabies described by many different authorities with different interests – zymotic rabies, epizootic rabies, furious rabies, dumb rabies, laboratory rabies, street rabies. The authors deliberately do not describe what rabies is, to allow the reader to share something of the historical discoveries and controversies, none of which are as clear-cut even in retrospect as a simple medically triumphalist account.
The nineteenth-century battle between the germ theory and the theory of spontaneous generation of disease was fought over rabies as much as any other condition. This debate was not purely medical, with the developing animal welfare movement generally arguing the case of spontaneous generation, with the mistreatment of dogs being a prime factor. The authors show how concerns about the mistreatment of dogs reflected concerns about wider social demoralisation and fear of the working class. Muzzling regulations – including those of the 1890s which were associated with the successful eradication of the disease – generally excluded the sporting dogs of the hunting set.
It is the nature of dramatic medical advances that they become mythologized. Louis Pasteur's 1885 announcement that he had successfully developed a rabies vaccine was cornerstone of the mythic view of Pasteur as a dedicated, devoutly Catholic benefactor of mankind, as exemplified by the Paul Mona in the 1937 film The Story of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur became a hate figure for antivivisectionists – who saw him as "the assumed god of biological science" – and was accused of creating a different form of "laboratory rabies" for the purposes of self-promotion.
The muzzling programme of the 1890s (as authors point out the other associated factors, especially improved care of dogs, aided eradication) was most strongly associated with Walter Long, president of the Board of Agriculture from 1895 to 1900, and later a severe chief secretary for Ireland and architect of the Government of Ireland Act.) Long received far more hate mail about the muzzling than any of his controversial involvements in Irish affairs. As well as antagonising animal welfare movements (then as now, the authors observe, the RSPCA generally kept to the official line while more militant groups vigorously opposed the new regulations) the muzzle was linked in feminist discourse to such traditionalistic, misogynistic (and possibly apocryphal) instruments of punishment as the "Gossip's bridle."
Links between feminism, animal welfare and a variety of spiritualist movements were complex. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be entered on the General Medical Council's register in 1859, illustrates these links well – she argued that women in medicine should use the power of "spiritual maternity" to heal society, while rejecting the excessively materialist germ theory, animal experimentation and Pasteur's treatments. The new generation of female doctors tended to reject Blackwell's beliefs.
The authors situate rabies in its wider social and political contexts, especially that of literature. Works such Richard Blackmore's 1872 novel The Maid of Sker – which Blackmore himself regarded as superior to Lorna Doone - Wuthering Heights, and The Hound of the Baskervilles were all informed by different interpretations of rabies.
The quality of rabies fiction diminished over the years. In the 1970s, a subgenre of Europhobic rabies-based horror fiction emerged. These were literal scare stories such as David Ann's The Day of the Mad Dogs, in which two tourists foolishly smuggle a stray from France. The virus mutates into an air-borne form. "The first victim of this new rabies, Lillian Shaw, a vivisectionist scientist, was gripped by a violent erotic mania and went on a hysterical rampage, seducing and sadistically killing men around her." W. Harris' Saliva focused on the emergence of a new strain of rabies amongst badgers that during World War II developed a taste for the flesh of dead soldiers. This form of rabies becomes a sexually transmitted disease. The story is set among "the political and diplomatic circles of Europe, where the disease spread among politicians who indulged their sexual appetites to stave off the boredom of life in Brussels." There is a sexualised intensity to this Europhobia that suggests that perhaps other anxieties are at play.
Britain's rabies-free status informed portrayals of Fortress Britain, an island nation free from continental contagion. Norman Tebbit announced in 1992 that "the blessing of insularity has long protected us against rabid dogs and foreign dictators alike." At European Community summits, the need to exclude rabies was often "the sole, and assumed to be unanswerable, illustration to Britain's claim for exceptions for rules that suited the rest of Europe." The institutions of rabies-free Britain must be inherently stronger than continental institutions. New Labour changed that, adopting Passports for Pets – a phrase originated by Screaming Lord Sutch's Monster Raving Loony Party – in 2000. This might be read as marking a end to the era of British exclusivity – although the bureaucratic and veterinary requirements for a pet passports are far from trivial and perhaps make it less of a populist programme, and less of a liberation for pets and pet owners, than one might think.
The book is a trove of fascinating material on a very diverse range of topics – the development of animal welfare, the professionalisation of veterinary medicine, British suspicion of foreign medicine, the tension between medical research and anti-vivisectionism, among many others – which is crisply and compellingly written.
