Rabid Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulders of such infuriated animals naturally droop down, attended with a copious flow of saliva from their mouths. The beasts in such a stateof frenzy, blinded and deafened by rage, roam about and bite each other.
    Among the vaunted Greeks, the medical understanding of
lyssa
was not nearly so sophisticated. Reference to the disease does not appear explicitly in Hippocrates. Aristotle does address rabies directly in his treatise
History of Animals,
though he flubs it in nearly every respect. Dogs, he wrote with an odd confidence, suffer from only three diseases:
lyssa,
or rabies;
cynanche,
severe sore throat or tonsillitis; and
podagra,
or gout. * The philosopher also held the belief that rabies could not be contracted by humans: “Rabies drives the animal mad, and any animal whatever, excepting man, will take the disease if bitten by a dog so afflicted; the disease is fatal to the dog itself, and to any animal it may bite, man excepted.” (Aristotle added that the elephant, generally thought then to be immune to disease, “is occasionally subject to flatulency.”)
    In the first two centuries A.D. , during roughly the same period that Sus´ruta (if the consensus estimates are true) was practicing his surgical wonders, the Greco-Roman tradition of medicine did begin to develop a comparably sophisticated understanding of rabies. This awareness begins with Aulus Cornelius Celsus, believed to have been born in around 25 B.C. and to have written during the early part of the first century. Almost nothing is known of Celsus’s life, in a civilization that took great pains to document the lives of men it considered sufficiently worthy. Pliny the Elder, the first-century historian and naturalist, believed that Celsus lived in the southern part of France, based on his reference to a vine that was native to that region. Celsus seems tohave been not a physician but an encyclopedist who compiled his
De medicina
largely from the Greeks. But while his notes on hydrophobia go well beyond the silence of Hippocrates and the complete misapprehension of Aristotle, they are hardly more incisive. He does recognize the existence of hydrophobia (“a most distressing disease, in which the patient is tortured simultaneously by thirst and by dread of water”) and pays at least lip service to the fact that “in these cases there is very little help for the sufferer.” His description of the malady ends there, though, and the balance of his account is given over to an elaborate and darkly amusing series of treatments—more on which later.
    It was a hundred years or so after Celsus that a school of scientific thought emerged to spur the classical tradition toward a better understanding not just of rabies but of medicine as a whole. Hoping to escape the intellectual strictures of the empiricists—who rejected not only experimentation but all theoretical approaches to medicine, holding that physicians should work based only on what they could perceive with the naked eye—these scholars called themselves the methodists, and they put forward a positive theory of how the human body functioned. That their theory (which involved conceiving of diseases as “affections” and considering their effects holistically) strikes the contemporary mind as largely nonsensical seems to have been beside the point. The methodists’ focus on improving therapy invigorated the whole enterprise of writing and thinking about human health.
    The founder of the methodist school, Themison (first century B.C. ), and one of his disciples, Eudemus, were both said to have survived attacks by rabid dogs; and either might have been the original author of an anonymous methodist text, usually dated to the first century A.D. , that touches on rabies at length. More impressive still are the notes on hydrophobia made by Soranus, a methodist physician (first or second century A.D. ) from Ephesus, on the western shore of what is now Turkey. Best known today for his prescient thoughts