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

by Vincent DiMarco

Overview

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 others—a 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 mankind’s best friend could be thought of as its cruelest, fiercest enemy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491718940
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/10/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
File size:	1 MB

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The Bearer of Crazed and Venomous FANGS

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

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By Vincent DiMarco

iUniverse LLC

Copyright © 2014 Vincent DiMarco
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1893-3

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CHAPTER 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

In 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 mad 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 an amulet. Close to two dozen more of Pliny's treatments and cures can be classed as animal in nature, including the dung of various species (chicken, goat, badger, hyena, and swallow), the flesh of veal and the hyena, salted fish, the ash of burnt river crabs, seal fat, goat's liver, women's menstrual fluid, and even the urine of the bitten patient. Book 29, chapter 32, Pliny's most focused and extended treatment of rabies and hydrophobia, dwells on the use of the dog itself in preventing madness from developing in those attacked, largely on the basis of the principles of sympathetic magic and the transference of disease. The ash of a burnt dog's head, for example, taken in drink or applied to the wound directly, is as effective, Pliny says, as eating a dog's head, wearing an amulet from a dead dog, placing in a cloth the menstrual fluid of a bitch, rubbing the wound with the ash from the hair under the tail of the mad dog, and consuming—raw or cooked, but raw is preferred—the liver of the offending animal. This last is deemed by Pliny even more effective in preventing the madness of rabies than a drink prepared from the slimy saliva found under the mad dog's tongue (limus salivae sub lingua rabiosi canus qui datus in potu).

In this same chapter, Pliny offers the earliest reference to the belief in the prophylactic powers of the tongue worm:

There is a little worm on the tongue of dogs which the Greeks call lytta (madness), and if this is taken away when they are baby puppies they neither go mad nor lose their appetite. It is also carried three times around fire and given to those bitten by a mad dog to prevent their going mad.

[E]st vermiculus in lingua canum qui vocatur a Graecis lytta, quo exempto infantibus catulis nec rabidi fiunt nec fastidium sentiunt. idem ter igni cirumlatus datur morsis a rabioso ne rabidi fiant. (Ed. and trans. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb ed. 8:246–49)

How does Pliny want his readers to understand vermiculus in this curious passage? Does he mean to record the belief of his informants in an actual worm? Literally, vermiculus denotes 'a little worm'; this is the sense in which Pliny uses it elsewhere, in a description of the mouse (10.85.186): "It is also related that when a mouse is going to die a little worm grows in his head" (Tradunt etiam obituris vermiculum in capite gigni). A somewhat literal sense likewise seems in evidence in the vermiculum of the Vulgate Exodus 35:25, usually translated as 'scarlet' [Vulg. and AV], 'scarlet stuff' [RSV] but clearly referring to the kermes insect, an organism whose dried body yields a scarlet dye (vermiculus can mean 'grub' or 'insect', as well as 'worm'). In our key passage, however, Pliny glosses vermiculus by Greek lytta, 'madness'. Lytta is the Attic form of Greek lyssa; both words were taken over into Latin, and Pliny uses lyssam in the sense of 'madness' or 'fury' in 3.1.8. Since the Greeks never referred to an actual worm as 'madness' or 'fury', Pliny's locution in the passage dealing with rabies could suggest the possibility of a less-than-literal, perhaps even metaphorical meaning of vermiculus, perhaps with the denotation of 'worm-shaped thing'. We may compare Lat vermiculatus, pple. of vermiculo, literally 'to infest with grubs, etc.', which takes on the meaning 'arranged to give the effect of wavy [i.e., worm-like] lines'.

Pliny earlier makes reference to Columella (Historia naturalis 8.63), who recommends to prevent a dog from developing rabies docking its tail by biting it off and amputating the end joint forty days after birth. This seems to imply a conceptual, or even causal, link of the spinal matter, which Columella says will not grow again, and the disease, and may thus offer a parallel to the tongue worm operation, by which Pliny may be implying the surgical removal of part of the dog's anatomy, rather than the removal of an actual parasitic worm. It strikes me as quite possible that, regardless of what his sources believed, Pliny may not be thinking of literal worms at all.

Pliny's Historia naturalis was an authoritative text in the Middle Ages, circulating as a complete text as well as excerpted in various encyclopedic works. The perpetuation of the tongue worm therapy was thus ensured, albeit in various forms that allowed for different readers' understandings and elaborations of the passage. The (late-fourth century?) Liber medicinae ex animalibus (Book of animal medicine) attributed to a Sextus Placitus Papyriensis (perhaps a phantom name; see de Vriend 1984, lxvii), included directions to snip the worms that are under the mad dog's tongue (vermes qui sub lingua canis rabiosi), carry them around a fig tree, then give them to the person who had been bit (de Vriend 1984, 264–65). Here, the operation is not designed to prevent puppies from developing rabies, but is performed on a dog already mad and intended solely to benefit the person who has been attacked.

Not so, however, to Johannes Varismann of Danzig, whose De rabidi canis morsu (Concerning the bite of a rabid dog), 1586, identifies the cause of rabies as worms that grow under the dog's tongue and tells us that hunters have assured him that cutting out such worms may sometimes cure the animal in the early stages of madness. Varismann, it seems, doubted this at first, but came around to believing it when he found it in Sextus Placitus's work as well as in that of a Simon Simonius, who supposedly learned it from Stephen, king of Poland, and then proved it himself (Thorndike 1941, 5:482).

For the fire around which Pliny says the worm is to be carried Sextus Placitus substitutes a fig tree, a change that may owe something to the fact that elsewhere in his remarks on treating the bite Pliny recommends administering fig leaves beaten up with vinegar and applied topically (23.63.64).

A short version of the Liber medicinae was incorporated in a text that came to be known as the Medicina de quadrupedibus (Art of healing quadrupeds), which was translated into late Old English (eleventh century?) and Middle English, both of which translations including the cure. Additionally, the authoritative medieval encylopedia, De proprietatibus rerum [On the properties of things], of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, ca. 1230, which likewise draws heavily on Pliny, discusses rabies in two separate books, one of which focuses on the behavior and condition of dogs so afflicted, the other on the ailment as it affects individuals bitten by the frenzied animals. The author's description of the wood [mad] hound—here quoted from the late-fourteenth-century translation of De proprietatibus rerum by John Trevisa—carries over Pliny's account of the tongue worm without comment. In this formulation it appears to be a cure for dogs already gone mad, rather than a prophylactic measure administered to puppies: "Plinius seiþ þat vnder þe houndes tonge liþ a worme þat makeþ houndes woode. And if þis worme is ytake out of þe tonge þanne þe yuel cesseþ" (18.34–35; Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1975 ed., 2:1169).

In Middle English the only metaphoric uses of the word worm (i.e., those instances not denoting a creature) are limited to 'the type of that which is worthless'; 'the type of that which stings or gnaws at the heart' (as for example the worm of conscience); and 'the type of that which insinuates itself into the heart and incites it to sin or vice, dread, etc.'. But since this range of definitions does not include any material object resembling a worm in shape or form, it is reasonable to conclude that the medieval texts here cited assume the literal existence of some madness-causing helminth, whatever Pliny's intended meaning. As we shall see, however, such literal- mindedness is very much the exception, even among writers long before the Scientific Revolution.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Illustrations, xi,
Acknowledgments, xiii,
Introduction: Dreams and Dead Ends, xv,
A Note on Terminology, xix,
1. The Worm beneath the Tongue, 1,
2. Animal Simples, 31,
3. Mysteries of the Madstone, 55,
4. "Trusting Most Certainly to a Broken Reed": Two Compound Remedies, 90,
5. Spurious Rabies: Spontaneous and Imagined, 112,
6. The Non-Existent Disease, 139,
7. "In Consequence of Fearful Madness": Terminating the Lives of Those Bitten by a Mad Dog, 167,
8. Relapse!, 200,
Afterword: Friends or Foes?, 221,
Appendix: Charms against the Mad Dog's Bite, 225,
Bibliography, 235,
Index, 289,