Free Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik Page B

acclaim, or being a “rabid Justin Bieber fan,” all derive their implicit wit from the notion of aficionados so passionate as to be foaming at the mouth.
    During the medieval period, the real advances in the medical understanding of rabies—as with advances in medicine more generally, for that matter—occurred almost entirely in the Islamic world. Through assiduous translation to Arabic, the great Muslim physicians perpetuated and extended the work of the Greeks and Romans. Arguably this process began in fifth-century Syria, where fleeing Christianheretics, expelled from the Byzantine church after denying the Nicene Creed, commingled with Arab-speaking Muslims and brought Greek traditions and texts to their attention. By the tenth century, Baghdad boasted an impressive system of hospitals; the thirteenth century saw the establishment of the Arab world’s first medical madrassa, in the old goldsmiths’ quarter of Damascus. Medieval Islamic physicians are even believed to have been the first to lay out a process akin to scholarly peer review: as prescribed by the Syrian doctor al-Ruhāwī, cases were double-checked afterward by a local council of fellow physicians, on the basis of whose judgment a doctor could be sued for malpractice.
    The three titans of medieval Islamic medicine—al-Rāzī (known to European history as Rhazes), Ibn Sīna (Avicenna), and Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar)—all addressed rabies in some detail in their central works. The first of these scholars, al-Rāzī, who wrote and practiced in Baghdad at the turn of the tenth century, recounted the cases of rabies he had personally witnessed:
    There was with us in hospital one such man who barked during the night and then died. Another did not drink water, but when some water was brought to him, he was not afraid of it, but said: “It stinks, and the stomachs of dogs and cats are in it.” Yet another patient, when he saw water, shuddered, shivered, and trembled until it was taken away from him.
    His preferred treatment for bites—cauterizing and scarifying the wound, followed by the application of suction cups to it—is as sensible as any described to that time.
    Ibn Zuhr, who wrote in Spain between 1121 and 1162, included an essay called “On Furious Madness” in the
Kitab al-Taysîr,
his magnum opus. As al-Rāzī did before him, he anchors his observation with a personal narrative. “My father,” he wrote, “to whom God grants mercy, taught me that a mule, having been affected by this sickness, will aimto bite a man. The latter, fleeing before the animal, will enter into an alleyway whose entrance is quite narrow. The mule will rush towards the entrance, head down, and will become so tightly compressed in it that it will only be able to extricate itself by its own death.”
    The sentiments on rabies expounded by Ibn Sīna, the most heralded of all medieval Islamic authors, seem lamentably off-key by today’s standards, even when compared with the views of his contemporaries. In the fourth book of his mammoth
Al-qanun fi al-tibb
(
The Canon of Medicine
)—composed during the early eleventh century, in Persia—the great doctor expressed the belief that heat and cold helped foment the disease, causing this “serious and venomous melancholy” in dogs. Moreover, he attributed it to the consumption of bad water and bad meat. Among the symptoms Ibn Sīna describes in human patients is a hallucination of little dogs, which one supposes to be possible enough. But among the treatments he recommends for human sufferers is cantharis, the legendary aphrodisiac that today we call Spanish fly; this seems a particularly odd choice for a malady whose symptoms, even on Ibn Sīna’s list, include priapism.
    A fairly lengthy treatment of rabies is found in the writings of Moses Maimonides, a twelfth-century Jewish philosopher and physician who practiced in Morocco and then, later, in Egypt. He recognized, contrary to widely held belief, that the bite of a mad dog