Rabid Read Online Free PDF

on gynecology, Soranus also left behind—in his treatises on acute and chronicdiseases, which survive in a full Latin translation made by Caelius Aurelianus during the fifth century—a few fairly lengthy sections on hydrophobia and its treatment. Unlike most of his predecessors, Soranus recognized that contact with rabid animals is the only means by which hydrophobia spreads. He even gives a seemingly far-fetched example that in fact might be possible, given what we know today about the disease:
    And once when a seamstress was preparing to patch a cloak rent by the bites of a rabid animal, she adjusted the threads along the end, using her tongue, and then as she sewed she licked the edges that were being joined, in order to make the passage of the needle easier. It is reported that two days later she was stricken by rabies.
    One gathers that Soranus is drawing upon close observation of quite a few rabies sufferers, given his thorough and plausible list of symptoms, which includes not just revulsion at water but rapid and irregular pulse, fever, incontinence, shaking, and—noted for the first time—involuntary ejaculation. He correctly rebukes an earlier writer for having claimed the disease can sometimes progress over the course of years. He even rebuffs Eudemus, Themison’s successor, for his idea that melancholy and hydrophobia were one and the same. “The victims of hydrophobia die quickly,” Soranus writes, “for it is not only an acute disease but one that is unremitting.”
    Throughout this vast expanse of history, the constant threat of rabies—rare yet tinged with horror—served as merely another wrinkle in early civilization’s intimate, complex relationship with the dog. By this point dogs had been domesticated (or had domesticated themselves, as most scholars now believe) for at least ten thousand years, and yet their role in society was profoundly dissonant. Based on findings of teeth and bones around Mesopotamian sites, archaeologists have concludedthat semi-feral dogs roamed cities as scavengers, feeding on trash. Yet many dogs were companions, for whose actions a human was responsible, as the Laws of Eshnunna attest. Alongside the other attendant advances of civilization, such as the city and the written word, reliable breeding of dogs first emerged during this period: remains of sight hounds—a purebred line of dogs that persists to this day in such graceful runners as greyhounds, whippets, and salukis—have been found in the region dating back as far as 3500 B.C. Dogs also figured prominently in the spiritual symbology of early Mesopotamia. In a curious connection to our joke, the dog seems to have been most invoked as the symbol of Gula, the spirit of healing; when archaeologists excavated her temple at Isin, the very same one over which the high priest is said to have presided, they found it studded with dog figurines. Later, King Nebuchadnezzar II, writing in roughly 600 B.C. , records that dog statuettes made of precious metals were left at Gula’s temple in Babylon.
    And so dogs occupied the lowest and yet also the highest rungs in the bestiary of early man: pitiful scavenger of garbage but also huntmate, totem, friend. It is a dual nature that persists into the present day, as one can vividly witness on the streets of any developing-world city, where the collared and the bathed uneasily coexist with the unkept and the unkempt. It is also a bifurcation that dates all the way back to the beginning of dog history, to the very first creatures to earn the name
Canis familiaris
. Scientists theorize that the indispensable hearth of domestication was the human garbage pile, with the wolves that scavenged there some fifteen thousand years ago becoming gradually more tame. By studying the mitochondrial DNA of various dogs from around the world, geneticists have tracked the site of this domestication to southern China—which means that, based on local traditions and archaeological records, the first