Free Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik

hunting book. It includes a chapter called “Of Sicknesses of Hounds and of Their Corruptions,” tucked in just before the languorous celebrations of the various hound breeds but after the elucidations of theirvarious prey (hare, hart, buck, roe, boar, wolf, fox, badger, wildcat, and, last but certainly not least, otter). The first dog malady, and the one considered at greatest length, is the “furious madness”:
    The hounds that be mad of that madness cry and howl with a loud voice, and not in the way that they were wont to when they were in health. When they escape they go everywhere biting both men and women and all that they find before them. And they have a wonderful perilous biting, for if they bite anything, with great pain it shall escape thereof if they draw blood, that it shall go mad whatever thing it be.
    It is recognized that such a condition, if not temporary, is invariably fatal: “Their madness cannot last but nine days but they shall never be whole but dead.” As a protective measure against rabies, the book follows Pliny in recommending that the “worm” beneath a hound’s tongue—in truth, a ligament—be cut out, by disabling the jaws with a staff and cutting out the offending worm with needle and thread or (in Edward’s addition) “a small pin of wood.”
    For men bitten by mad dogs,
The Master of Game
suggests a number of remedies, though a few of these are dismissed in the same breath as they are proposed. For example, some bitten men go to the sea and allow nine waves to pass over them, but “that is but of little help.” Other men pull all the feathers from around a live rooster’s anus and, hanging the poor bird by the neck and wings, set the anus on the bite wound, on the theory that said anus would suck forth the poison. If the rooster swells up and dies, then the hound is mad, but the man will be healed; that is, the book avers, “many men say” this is the case, but “thereof I make no affirmation.” The authors seem to feel on more solid footing with the suggestions of cauterization (“it is a good thing for to hollow it all about the biting with a hot iron”) and bloodletting, both of which might actually have done the victim some good. They also spell outsome recipes for medicinal salves. First is prescribed a sauce of salt, vinegar, garlic, and nettles; second, and more appetizing still, is a paste in which the garlic and nettles have been combined with leeks, chives, olive oil, and vinegar. *
    The most lavish prophylaxis against hydrophobia in the hunting hound was carried out, fittingly, by the kings of France. In the hunting accounts of the French palace, historians have found annual outlays for all the king’s hounds to undergo a special ceremony. They were transported to the Church of St. Menier les Moret, in order “to have a mass sung in the presence of the said hounds, and to offer candles in their sight, for fear of the
mal de rage
”—that is, the disease of rabies. One wonders whether the hounds howled along.
    The medieval period is also when our contemporary terms for rabies and hydrophobia began to enter the vernacular—in both their literal and metaphorical meanings. The French word
rage
is a derivative of
rabies,
which in Latin served as a rough equivalent of
lyssa
. As with that Greek term,
rage
in French begins its life both as a horrible disease and as something more profound, a sort of animalistic fury tinged with madness. The earliest documented uses are in
The Song of Roland,
circa 1100; the first of these appears in the reaction by the king, upon hearing that the treacherous count Ganelon has tapped Roland, his own stepson, to lead the rear guard (Ganelon has cut a deal with the enemy, the Muslim king Marsil in Spain, that his Saracens will attack from the rear). Says the poet:
    When the King hears, he looks upon him straight,
    And says to him: “You devil incarnate;
    Into your heart is come a mortal hate [rage].”
    The second is used to