Free Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik Page A

describe the folly of a Saracen who, in the heat of battle, launches an ill-advised attack on Roland: “
Par sun orgoill cumencet mortel rage,
” or “A mortal hate he’s kindled in his pride.”
    It was not until the seventeenth century that “rabies” and “rabid” seem to have found purchase in English. Interestingly, the
OED
’s earliest use of the latter precedes the former—a reference to “rabid mastifs” in a 1596 translation from the Greek. The seventeenth-century uses of both terms seem to have been restricted, if not to the literal disease (or the semblance of it) in animals, then to a particularly vociferous rage, verging on madness: for example, “Rabid with anguish, he retorts his looke Vpon the wound” (1621); “Hee…strokes and tames my rabid Griefe” (1646). But rabies is irresistible as a metaphor; in both English and French, the word began to fan out into far more playful contexts within a century or two of adoption in both cases. By 1288, a French wag is wondering over “
tel conseil et tel rage,
” or “such counsel and such rage,” that is given to the king; by 1678, we have the very contemporary sense, true in English as well, of rage as a fashion, for example,
la rage de la bassette,
the faddishness of a then-popular card game. “Rabid” in English being significantly newer, the drift occurred somewhat later, and so we must wait until the nineteenth century to get, for example, the “rabid desire for the good opinion of every thing human” (1838).
    How should we feel about these uses of rabies as simile, as trope, as joke? In
Illness as Metaphor,
Susan Sontag chronicled the myriad ways that our popular understandings of disease—tuberculosis and cancer, in particular—have been polluted by literary associations throughout history. As she demonstrates, disease metaphors gave rise to a particularly pernicious form of pseudoscience, fostering the myth that certain personality types (the romantic, decadent figure in the case of TB, the repressed and dissatisfied in the case of cancer) had a greater propensity to contract each disease. Metaphors also helped to stigmatize the ill, as moral judgment slipped backward from literary invocations of the disease (“cancer in the body politic,” or Victor Hugo’s remark in
Les misérables
that monasticism is “for civilizationa sort of tuberculosis”) to taint the sufferer. Sontag’s point, which she declares with thunder on her very first page, “is that illness is
not
a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”
    The injunction is an admirable one, but it’s hard to look at the function of disease in history (especially in history before the Pasteurian era of the late nineteenth century, when people first learned about the microscopic nature of disease) without concluding the injunction to be an impracticable one as well. For millennia, disease
was
metaphor—the carrying of a mysterious foreign meaning within the familiar vessel of a human being; the very etymology of the term (
pheroō,
or “carry,” plus
meta,
or “across”) invoked just such an act of freightage. And this inevitability of metaphor in disease is nowhere more present than with rabies, where the name itself in multiple languages—
lyssa, rabies, rage, rabia
—also describes a human emotion of fury, with the twinned meaning extending back indefinitely, neither the medical nor the figurative sense taking clear precedence. Rabies was
identical
with a visitation of animal rage; or, if it was not quite a true identity between the two, the link transcended mere metaphor to become intrinsic to both poles of the comparison. Insofar as rabies (from the Babylonians to
The Office
) has served as grist for comedy, it’s the extremity of the fury that provides the punch line—the rage for the card game, or the “rabid desire” for others’