Histoire de la rage. Cave canem

In 1901, when Pasteur had been dead for six years and his rabies vaccine had been used in man for sixteen years, Emile Roux, Pasteur's trusted medical adviser, friend, and collaborator, wrote: "None among the acute infectious diseases has a more fascinating history than rabies." Medical scientists of his day would have agreed with him; so would generations of physicians and writers since the days of Aristotle; only a poll of social historians and demographers of our own century would be likely to show a very different result. For part of the fascination of rabies has always been its unpredictability and sporadic choice of victims, even at times when epizootic spread among wild animals brought the potential of infection close to centres of human habitation. However dramatic its manifestations and however tragic the outcome of individual cases, the actual numbers of its human victims could never by any stretch of the imagination be said to have a significant impact on population densities. There will always be room for further analysis of aspects of the great epidemics of plague and of smallpox; but it is hard to imagine the demographers ever turning their attention to rabies. It is only in the history of ideas that the disease can claim our interest. Now, in a book published hard on the heels of the centenary of the first post-exposure vaccination administered to Joseph Meister in July 1885, Jean Theodorides, the authority par excellence on the history of rabies, has put between covers comprehensive information on all its medical, literary, artistic, and philosophical aspects from antiquity to the present day. Handsomely illustrated and carefully compiled, this scholarly book proceeds chronologically, beginning in the Mesopotamia ofthe twenty-third century BC and taking us through to the latest improvements in rabies vaccines which, based on non-infective yet immunogenic parts ofvirions grown in purified cell-culture rather than mammalian tissue, would have amazed and delighted Pasteur by their quality and low risk of contamination. In chapter I, on rabies in antiquity, the erudite author presents us with a multitude of quotes and references from the surviving texts of Eastern and Middle-Eastern civilizations, as well as the classical texts of Greece and Rome. He is well aware that not all of the material cited necessarily refers to rabies; any severe dog-bite might lead to general sepsis (especially in the conditions then prevailing), and, conversely, symptoms of hydrophobia and encephalitis could …