The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous Fangs: Popular Myths and Learned Delusions Regarding the Bite of the Mad Dog

By Vincent DiMarco

For centuries prior to the development of an effective vaccination against rabies, the bite of a mad dog was linked to a horrific ailment marked by convulsions, an utter dread of swallowing liquids, uncontrollable thrashing, and even the tendency to bark and attempt to bite othersa horrid prelude to an agonizing death.

Drawing on learned theories of medical practitioners and beliefs of the common people, The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous Fangs investigates the cultural mythology of the ailment known today as rabies. By exploring the cultural history of science, traditional belief, and folk medicine, it reveals the popular myths and learned delusions that came to define the disease. Among the arresting topics explored are the attribution of rabies to a worm beneath the tongue, the notion that the disease could arise spontaneously, the idea that it could be cured by the application to the wound of special stones or animal parts, and, if all else failed, the treatment of it by the suffocation of the human victim.

Rich in detail and brimming with historical intrigue, The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous Fangs engages students of medicine and the history of science, veterinary studies, folklore, psychology, and anyone interested in how mankinds best friend could be thought of as its cruelest, fiercest enemy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491718940

Vincent DiMarco

Vincent DiMarco, professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, taught and published on medieval literature for more than thirty years. Since retiring, he has published two books on British domestic culture. DiMarco and his wife live in Montreal and Vermont with their Labrador retriever, Rocco.

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The Bearer of

CRAZED AND VENOMOUS

FANGS

Popular Myths and Learned Delusions regarding the Bite of the Mad Dog

Vincent DiMarco

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous Fangs

Popular Myths and Learned Delusions regarding the Bite of the Mad Dog

Copyright © 2014 Vincent DiMarco.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1893-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1895-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1894-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923676

Printed in the United States of America.

iUniverse rev. date: 03/06/2014

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Dreams and Dead Ends

A Note on Terminology

1 The Worm beneath the Tongue

To Worm or Not to Worm

The Worm Has Turned—into a Pustule!

The Worm, Drunkards, and the Zombie Apocalypse

2 Animal Simples

Chickens for Snakebites

Chickens for the Plague

Chickens for the Mad Dog’s Bite

Chickens for Whatever Ails You

Cured by the Serpent’s Tooth?

3 Mysteries of the Madstone

Gems and Stones of Potent Virtue

Toadstones, Snakestones, and Bezoars

From Snakestones to Madstones

Mr. Lincoln Goes to Terre Haute

4 Trusting Most Certainly to a Broken Reed: Two Compound Remedies

The Ormskirk Medicine

The Tonquin Cure

5 Spurious Rabies: Spontaneous and Imagined

Spontaneous Rabies

Spontaneity Redivivus?

Imagined Rabies

6 The Non-Existent Disease

7 In Consequence of Fearful Madness: Terminating the Lives of Those Bitten by a Mad Dog

A Dismal Collection of Notices

Smothering before the Law

Human Barks and Bites

(Rabid?) Creatures of the Night

8 Relapse!

Arboreal Exhalations

Death by Breath

The Sorb Tree and Its Dangerous Ilk

Afterword: Friends or Foes?

Appendix: Charms against

the Mad Dog’s Bite

Bibliography

Frontispiece: Outside scene with a mad dog attacking a man. From an Arabic translation of De materia medica of Dioscorides, by Abdallah ibn al-Fadl, 1224. Reproduced by permission of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1953.91.

To Rocco

Quia potest!

… [S]o prevalent is prejudice, and so natural is the propensity of man to adhere to opinions once rooted in his mind, that whenever an instance occurs of a person being bitten by a mad dog, the confidential receipt-book of Lady Bountiful is immediately unfolded, the charm or incantation is wound up, the hotch-potch of herbs is prepared, the dog is sacrificed, and his liver is chopped, and offered up at the altar of superstition. The poor bitten subject is harassed by the several candidates who throw in their separate claims for infallibility; he is sent to the sea, he undergoes a ducking, he is brought back and sent again. In short, if absorption of the venom hath taken place, and he really becomes diseased, he is often deserted through fear by his nearest relatives, or which has been done, a period is put to his existence by suffocation. I shrewdly suspect that if the secret ingredients of the compounds be disclosed, which are boasted of in families, they will bear evident marks of legitimacy to one or other of these presumed remedies, which I am about to expose for that very reason.

—Jesse Foot, An Essay on the Bite of the Mad Dog, 1788

Illustrations

1. Frontispiece. Outside scene with a mad dog attacking a man. From an Arabic translation of the De materia medica of Dioscorides, by Abdallah ibn al-Fadl, Iraq, 1224.

2. Canis rabidus, woodcut from Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentaires…sur les six livres de Ped. Diosc. Anazarbeen de la matiere medicinale, 1579.

3–4. The worm beneath the tongue, from Robert Hamilton, Remarks on the Means of Obviating the Fatal Effects of a Mad Dog or Other Rabid Animal, 1785.

5. Sucking Poison from Dog-Bite. Cigarette card, Gallaher’s Boy Scout Series (ca. 1921–29), No. 98.

6. "For the Bite of a Mad Dog—Ormskirk [sic, for Tonquin]," Cookery and Physic MS of Helen Weldon of Bath, England, 1778.

Acknowledgments

M y deepest debt is to my wife and compañera , Jamie Fumo, who found the time in the midst of her own researches and writing to read what I thought was a polished final draft of this book and to improve it mightily. As with an earlier book, I have been privileged to draw upon the resources of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine of McGill University, whose splendid collection was made available to me through the kind ministrations of Christopher Lyons, Anna Dysert, Lily Szczygiel, and the late Diane Philip. My researches were likewise aided by Nicole Joniec of the Library Company of Philadelphia and Daniel N. Rolph of the Historical Society of Pennsyl vania.

While translations in this book are my own unless otherwise noted, I have had the benefit of circulating versions to colleagues and friends. I gratefully acknowledge, first and foremost, Cathy Portuges, who improved (and not infrequently corrected) my translations of various French scientific and medical texts of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Likewise to be thanked are Roberto Ludovico and Andrea Cristiani, for help on a vexacious passage from Bernardino Bocha’s Divini fioreti medicativi e preservative contra peste; James Freeman, for unraveling obscure points in a key section of Johann Varismann’s De rabidi canis morsu ac hydrophobia; and David Danbeck, who helped me solve the mysteries of Fracastoro’s Alcon. I have profited from discussion of my work with David Benson, Allan Gilmour, Claudia Kawczynska, Michael Pettit, Monique Polak, John Sitter, and Harlan Sturm.

Regarding published material, I am most indebted to the late Jean Théodoridès, whose Histoire de la rage, 1986, remains the finest historical study of rabies and a seemingly inexhaustible source of pertinent bibliographical citations.

I gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to print unpublished material:

The Wellcome Library, London: an excerpt from An Infallible Cure for the Bite of a Mad Dog, Brought from Tonquin by Sir George Cobb, Baronet. Wellcome Library MS. 7019/2. Ca. 1764.

The Library Company of Philadelphia: an excerpt from A Letter of Dr. Samuel Davies of Petersburg, VA, to Benjamin Rush, October 2, 1801. 24 Rush MS 80.

The cover illustration, a woodcut of a rabid dog, is from Jacques Grevin, Deux livres de venins (Anvers: Christofle Plantin, 1568), p. 163; reproduced with permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal, Blacker-Wood Collection.

The title, The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous Fangs, translates a phrase of Suśruta (sixth or fifth century B.C.E, text redacted third or fourth century C.E.) describing the mad dog.

Introduction: Dreams and Dead Ends

But I am over-tedious in these toyes, which howsoever, in some men’s too severe censures, they may be held absurd and ridiculous, I am the bolder to insert, as not borrowed from circumforanean rogues and gypsies, but out of the writings of worthy philosophers and physicians, yet living some of them, and religious professors in famous universities, who are able to patronize that which they have said, and vindicate themselves from all cavillers and ignorant persons.

—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

T his is a book of false starts, detours and divagations, crackpot theories and bizarre speculations—all in response to what we today refer to as rabies, a disease which was, and remains, virtually always communicated by the bite of an infected animal. Although all warm-blooded animals can contract rabies, and today in many regions of the world the bat is a prime carrier of the virus and source of human infection, historically it has been the dog—specifically, that identified as the mad dog —which has most frequently played the role of antagonist and source of infection, and whose bite stands metonymically for the disease itself. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, to be bitten by a mad dog and not to receive extraordinary (or miraculous) treatment meant one would almost certainly develop the signature symptom of the disease, a horrid dread of swallowing liquids; and once that symptom manifested, the victim was doomed to a horrific, agonizing death. Over the centuries, the bite of the mad dog effectively and for all practical purposes meant death.

How the dog became infected (i.e., went mad) and whether this was believed to be the product of another animal’s infectious bite or the spontaneous result of environment, living conditions, or behavior, naturally became part of the mythology of the ailment and is thus a focus of the investigations to follow. Likewise central to this study of the disease’s cultural identity are the various therapies and treatments, even the supposed cures of fully developed cases—all born of ignorance of the ailment’s true nature but put into practice for centuries in the desperate and failed attempt to ameliorate the unendurable suffering rabies caused.

It is a commonplace, but true, to say that for the thousands of years during which rabies was recorded, prevailing medical theory could not have been expected to understand the nature of the disease: how it was caused; how it developed; what treatments, if any, were potentially efficacious. It is a tribute to the genius of Louis Pasteur (himself not a medical doctor, interestingly enough, and perhaps for that reason not shackled by centuries-old principles of Galenic humorism, Paracelsian chemistry, corpuscular theory, etc.) that in the 1880s this great researcher was able to develop what proved to be an effective vaccination for rabies without ever identifying or observing the disease’s pathogen. Less gifted researchers, not to mention the general populace, were left to grasp at straws and pursue chimeras.

The investigations that make up this book, however, are not centered on the disease itself and the evolving knowledge of its treatment since Pasteur’s breakthroughs. Such subjects have been exhaustively explored by medical researchers in what comprises a huge scientific bibliography of a human disease that now, although not eliminated, is at least preventable. The focus here is on what was believed about rabies, largely incorrectly, for the most part (but not exclusively) in the time before Pasteur, by laypersons and medical professionals alike. Often, as we shall see, the understanding of both the general populace and the medical establishment, each having been influenced by such folkloric beliefs as sympathy, transference, and the principle of like curing like, differed less than one might at first suppose regarding the nature of the disease, its transmission, and treatment. We will see this in our first chapter, an investigation of the bizarre theory that rabies could be traced to a worm under the dog’s tongue which on removal would prevent the development and spread of the disease. Even as folklore yielded to anatomical research and the worm began to be understood less literally than in earlier times, traces of this imagined parasite re-emerged—reincarnated, so to speak—in nineteenth-century medical accounts of its presence under the tongue of the human victims of a mad dog’s bite, often with the same hope that with its removal the disease could be stopped in its tracks.

More directly focused on prevention, three early chapters then explore various treatments administered after the bite, ideally before the full-blown disease has manifested. Two of these therapies, like the belief in the disease-bearing worm, have their roots in folk medicine: the venerable practice of holding a plucked and sometimes partially dismembered chicken to a human victim’s bite wound in order to draw out the poison before it entered the system, and the equally widespread application of various sucking stones to accomplish the same end, sometimes days or weeks after the bite occurred. Our discussion of prophylactics is then broadened by an investigation of two compound remedies popular in eighteenth-century England, the famous Ormskirk medicine and the similarly well-known Tonquin cure, both of which relied for their supposed efficacy on a combination of animal, vegetable, and mineral ingredients. It is not to the credit of their purveyors that advertisements of such manufactured medicines often dangled the possibility they could obliterate the disease even after it had spread from the bite wound, when fear of swallowing liquids, along with convulsions, had already begun and the patient was doomed.

Some of the therapies to be explored in the chapters to follow were unique to rabies and its particularly grotesque and inevitably fatal character. Others reveal a history of treatment adapted from other ailments like plague and snakebite poisoning, in the largely mistaken belief that rabies was essentially similar to those maladies in its nature, etiology, and progress. And as we shall see, the fact that other diseases exhibited the symptom of aversion to swallowing liquids (hydrophobia), as well as the absence of any observable pathogen, was fastened upon as evidence by a outspoken minority of clinicians who denied the very existence of rabies as a specific disease, in spite of the similarity of symptoms in so many victims of a mad dog’s bite and the manifest success of Pasteur’s vaccine in combating these indications of otherwise fatal illness. But as a companion chapter will show, even among many of those clinicians who (correctly) retained a belief in the existence of rabies as a distinct ailment, there was widespread belief that the fearful knowledge of the effects of a mad dog’s bite on others, even strangers, could engender the disease in those of weak character, melancholic disposition, or morbid sensibilities who were themselves not bitten, or bitten only by an uninfected animal.

Equally suggestive of the degree of the human victim’s powerlessness in the face of a disease that so resisted understanding and cure is the frightening belief that anyone once bitten but not, for whatever reason, having developed the disease, could in fact relapse into full-blown rabies by reclining under certain trees and thus allowing the airborne diffusion of harmful effluvia to enter the body and activate the dormant infection. Once bitten, it was believed by many, one was forever at risk.

In recounting the seemingly numberless physical threats to mankind in this terrestrial vale of tears, St. Augustine (City of God, 22.22, ante 429 C.E.) pays particular attention to the deadly bite of wild animals, especially the bite of the mad dog, in its effect on the victim’s loved ones: so that even the animal which of all others is most gentle and friendly to his own master, becomes an object of intenser fear than a lion or dragon, and the man whom it has by chance infected with this pestilential contagion becomes so rabid, that his parents, wife, children, dread him more than any wild beast. The threat of physical harm from a loved one seen howling, spitting, barking, and snarling in his death throes was as real and affecting, we may imagine, as the frustration in knowing that person’s agony was incurable. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, to discover a widespread custom of terminating the lives of those suffering—or thought to be suffering—from full-blown rabies, most often without these victims’ consent. Notwithstanding the high-minded assertions of the Victorian medical establishment that such practices were nothing more than old wives’ tales, the regrettable remnants from a distant past, or behaviors indulged in only by the less civilized, the record, as we shall see in the chapter devoted to this morally dubious practice, clearly shows an extended history of such enforced measures—most commonly, smothering the victim between mattresses—which found considerable support in both the medical and legal establishments.

But beyond the immediate physical threat posed by the afflicted lay an even more elemental fear: the ancient belief that the disease would turn a human into someone who acted like the crazed animal that had bitten him. Dogs were commonly considered the animal closest to man—in intelligence; in behavior that displayed human-like loyalty, obedience, and devotion; and in their temperamental disposition to melancholy. It was a surfeit of the melancholic humor, Robert Burton wrote in 1661, that caused both dogs and humans to run mad (Burton 1932 ed., 1:79). As Ambroise Paré had explained a century earlier, both the infected animal and its human victim suffered a loss of reason and mental functions, as the melancholic vapors of the rabies poison, affecting the brain, altered and corrupted the temperament (Paré 1970 ed., 3:307). This was thought to result in behavior that was more than merely similar or imitative: as documented by Martin Lister, Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1683, some of the organic parts of the body of one who had died, biting and snarling at all around him, had been transformed into, or affected after the nature of a Dog. And bearing in mind how prevalent was the idea that rabies could be passed through a bite or scratch from one human to another, we will not be surprised to learn that vampirism, lycanthropy, and even zombiism were considered by some to be derivative from, or at least suspiciously reminiscent of rabies. As has been suggested by more than one student of the disease (e.g., Wasik and Murphy 2012, 163), the most basic fear rabies elicits is that it strips us of our reason, our autonomy, and our civilized humanity, to turn us into raging, irrational, savage beasts.

It is appropriate, then, that this study includes as an appendix a collection, drawn from the world over, of charms, prayers, and imprecations invoked by the faithful (and the desperate) against the mad dog and its bite.

A Note on Terminology

The investigations which follow, while often extending into modern and even contemporary times, are for the most part concerned with researches, beliefs, and theories that took shape and found wide currency in the time before Pasteur’s discoveries in the 1880s, usually long before. Following today’s accepted scientific practice, however, I use the word rabies in my commentary and analysis in discussing the disease that in earlier periods—as the reader will see from quoted texts—was usually referred to as hydrophobia, with some commentators reserving the latter term for the disease when it passed from infected animals to humans. The English word hydrophobia (from the Greek, whence the corresponding Latin form) came to designate the disease based on what was believed to be its defining symptom in man, the fear or dread of water, specifically of swallowing it. Since, however, a suffering patient may in fact desire water but be unwilling or unable to swallow it when it is offered, perhaps the less than mellifluous word dyscataposis ‘difficulty in swallowing’ would have been preferable. Benjamin Moseley (1808b, 251) used this very term to describe what he saw as the characteristic symptom, along with choking, of a stage in the disease of a patient bitten by a mad dog, a stage between a fear of water—but not, he thought, of other liquids—and convulsions.

It is important to realize that, in spite of the accounts and descriptions of many early commentators, the symptom of hydrophobia is almost never manifested by dogs suffering from the disease.

Rabies (Classical Latin rabiēs ‘savageness, morbid affection of dogs’< rabere, ‘to rave, rage, be mad’, of uncertain origin) was first used in English, in the middle of the seventeenth century, to denote a disease synonymous with canine madness. In this sense it was preceded by the term rage (from post-classical Latin rabia, itself an alteration of classical Latin rabiēs), which was employed to denote rabies in a dog as early as ca. 1410, by Edward, Duke of York, in his Master of Game. Edward’s text was largely a translation of Gaston III, Count of Foix’s Livre de chasse (Book of the hunt; late fourteenth century), which likewise uses rage, but the the word in Old French had been used to denote the disease from as early as 1225 and la rage remains the modern French term for the disease.

The reader should note that early citations of the English word virus (from Classical Latin vīrus ‘poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid’) in texts quoted below usually carry the meaning of ‘venom’ (first attested in English in 1599), though the word had been used since the beginning of the fifteenth century with the medical meaning of ‘pus or other discharge produced by an ulcer’ as well as with the rare denotation ‘semen’ (ca. 1398; Latin vīrus was used in this sense by Lucretius). The Latin word is a (rare) second declension neuter; as a mass noun, denoting something uncountable, it has no plural (the plural of English virus being viruses). The word in English began to be used with a general meaning of ‘agent that causes infectious disease’ in the eighteenth century; this appears to be the sense in which Pasteur used it. Teigen (2007, 147) usefully notes that before Pasteur the word, so used, often carried the connotation of a deadly unseen and unknown principle.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, virus was used to refer to a pathogenic agent so small that it passed through filters that retained bacteria (hence was filterable) and could not be seen by the microscopes then in use. First detected by electron microscopes, viruses are now known to function only within the cells of a host, and to consist of a nucleic acid molecule (DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protein coat (or as Sir Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel Prize recipient in Physiology or Medicine, remarked, a bit of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news).

56419.png

Canis rabidus, woodcut from Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentaires…

sur les six livres de Ped. Diosc. Anazarbeen de la matiere medicinale.

Translated (into French) from the last Latin edition by Jean des Moulins.

Lyon: Guill. Rouille, 1579, p. 828. Reproduced by permission of the

Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University.

1

The Worm beneath

the Tongue

To Worm, v2: ‘To deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad’.

—Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

I n first treating putative causes of rabies we focus attention on a long-lived, bizarre belief inherited from the Elder Pliny’s Historia naturalis (Natural history), first century C.E., that the disease in dogs, and hence in humans bitten by them, was the direct result of a worm on the animal’s tongue—commonly understood to be on the underside of that organ—which, if removed early, would prevent the dog from going mad without otherwise affecting it. Over time, as we shall see, commentators sought to understand this worm in ways consistent with developing anatomical knowledge and clinical experience. But even when the worm was thus demystified by medical science, its removal supposedly to prevent the disease continued to be advocated by many practitioners. And proof of its relation to the disease in humans was discovered, it was believed, in the worm’s apparent presence under the tongue of the human victims of the bite of a ma d dog.

To Worm or Not to Worm

Given the obvious association of worms with putrefaction and decay and the frequently observed presence of worms in the bodies of dead animals, we can hardly be surprised that various imaginary worms and parasites thought to cause human ailments were called into being over the course of time. Yet the sheer range of such imagined organisms, comprehensively catalogued by Grove (1990, 765–70), fairly astounds in the extent to which both the educated and the general populace misguidedly turned ordinary pathological changes such as coagulated blood and necrotic tissue, or even normal anatomical structures, into such dangerous, fantastical creatures as eyeworms, earworms, nasal worms, urine worms, umbilical worms, echoing worms (which made their host sick by producing an echo of his speech), and other disease-producing organisms.

Roundworms, tapeworms, and pinworms had been recognized from the time of Galen, while hookworms, discovered by Antonie Dubini, were known from 1838, and belief in worms’ spontaneous generation, though somewhat shaken by the invention of the microscope and van Leeuwenhoek’s observation of microorganisms, hung on well into the eighteenth century. It was almost inevitable, then, that worms supposedly responsible for rabies would have been reported. Martin Scheffer in his 1610 doctoral dissertation (Théodoridès 1986, 95) noted what he thought were small worms issuing from the saliva of a mad dog. In his De rabie contagiosa (Concerning contagious rabies), 1625, Giuseppi degli Aromatari asserted that worms were sometimes generated in the anterior part of the head of both the mad dog and its human victim. Likewise, Theophilus Bonetus, in his Sepulcretum (Burying place), 1679, noted that worms had been observed in the brains of mad dogs (with a scholium to the effect that such worms existed therein in pretty large bubbles, elevated on the viscous and putrid liquor of the brain). Similarly, the Swiss physician and humanist scholar Theodor Zwinger (1597–1654) placed great importance on the discovery of a whitish, thickish worm in a tumor in the paw of a mad dog which was cured after biting a boy by opening the tumor that was believed to have driven the dog to frenzy. Regarding this last, in 1761 the great Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1769 trans., 183) politely remarked: That the dog was really mad Zwingerus knew, who was physician to the boy in the hydrophobia. That the dog also was cur’d in such a manner, as he was a neighbour to the dog’s master, he could not but know. Yet I had rather that he himself had examin’d this worm, in order more certainly to know, that a true worm, and not any thing in the shape of a worm only, had come out of the tumour.

Pierre Desault’s Dissertation sur les maladies vénériennes contenant une method de les guérir (Dissertation on the venereal diseases containing a method of curing them), 1733, explained the action of the worms he saw in the saliva of mad dogs as insinuating themselves in the blood through the wound made by the teeth, then multiplying in the bitten victim to the point where they could attack the brain, the throat, and the salivary glands, causing delirium, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and finally death. Even the aversion of one bitten by a mad dog to drinking liquids was explained along similar lines:

[H]e perceives first that swallowing his Spittle gives him violent Pains in his Stomach, and that Drinking flings him into Convulsions. These Symptoms no doubt arise, because in swallowing of Liquids, some of the worms are washed down into the Stomach, which occasion these Disorders there. Is there need of any thing else to set him against Drinking? (Desault 1738 trans., 210)

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771, 3:151) listed worms generated in the kidneys, guts, brain, or nostrils as one of the preceding causes of rabies in animals. Particularly interesting in this regard is the fact that as late as 1864—a scant two decades before Pasteur’s successful researches in the nature and cure of the disease—the eminent French chemist, naturalist, and physiologist François-Vincent Raspail described rabies as an invasion of the central nervous system and, in dogs, of the lingual frenum, by an insect, mite or parasitic worm of large or small size (d’un centre nerveux et chez chiens du filet de la langue par un insect, acarien ou heminth de grande ou petite taille; Théodoridès 1986, 167). Raspail added that the introduction of the rabies virus produces the same effects as the parasitism of the insect (L’inoculation du virus rabique produit les memes effets que le parasitisme de l’insecte).

Raspail’s description brings us to the famous worm implicated in the spread of rabies: the worm found under the tongue of a dog. Curiously, this creature finds no mention in Grove’s compendium of imaginary worms and pseudo-parasites, though comparison with another of the most well-known and long-accepted imaginary helminths, the tooth worm said to cause dental carries, is instructive. Both of these imagined organisms are of venerable antiquity, with the first mention of the tooth worm, according to Townend (1944, 37) appearing in a papyrus of the twentieth dynasty of Egypt, ca. 1200–1100 B.C.E, and the tongue worm of the dog recorded by Pliny, who learned of it from earlier (unnamed) sources. Moreover, belief in both of these fantastical bearers of disease was if not universal, seemingly ubiquitous, and hardly the unique expression of any one culture. Likewise, belief in both of these imaginary organisms outlived what should have been the definitive scientific refutations of their existence—the tooth worm having been authoritatively refuted by Pierre Fauchard (1690–1761), the father of modern dentistry, in his overthrow of the pronouncements of Nicolas Andry, Dean of the Medical Faculty of Paris; and the tongue worm, rejected by a host of medical practitioners around the same time, as we shall see.

The origins of these imaginary creations lie hidden in the distant past; we can speculate as does Townend (38) that they took root as personifications of a demon or evil spirit in line with the animistic concept of disease which plays so large a part in primitive medicine. But at some point belief in them must have been based on misunderstood anatomical and physical structures, such as the dental nerve which was sometimes extracted to relieve the pain of carious teeth, and the somewhat mysterious structure under the dog’s tongue.

In his vast and largely uncritically transmitted compendium of facts and beliefs related to the natural world, the Historia naturalis, Gaius Plinius Secundus (23–79 C.E.), also known as Pliny the Elder, introduces the subject of dog bites and, more specifically, the bites of mad dogs, in fifteen of his encyclopedia’s thirty-seven books. Of the approximately fifty different treatments, prophylactics, and cures that he collects, slightly less than half are herbal-based, relying on such plants, herbs, and spices as alysson, corresponding to modern alyssum, and so named, says Pliny, because it ‘prevents madness [a privitive + lyssa, ‘madness, rage’] in those bitten by a dog when taken in vinegar and worn as