Rabid Quotes

“Some primeval force must truly be at work when the lamb can be made into a lion.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Rabies coevolved to live in the dog, and the dog coevolved to live with us - and this confluence, the three of us, is far too combustible a thing.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“After a bite, the rabies virus binds quickly into the peripheral nerves but then makes its course with almost impossible sloth, usually requiring at least three weeks and often as long as three months to arrive at and penetrate the brain.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Our only consolation, as we feel our own strength failing us, is to feel that we may help those who come after us to do more and to do better than ourselves, fixing their eyes as they can on the great horizons of which we only had a glimpse,” pronounced Pasteur, with characteristic gallantry. Many”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Dogs' bond with humans is bred into their very cells, their genes; it's written through their entire history, a chronicle that can be read in their eyes. But inside this black wire cage, in the lolling eyes of what remained of a Pekingese, there was nothing legible at all. One could hardly grieve for the dog, because the dog was already gone. To euthanize it - which a BAWA vet mercifully did, moments later, with the customary dose of anesthesia - was merely to acknowledge its departure.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“humans still die in the tens of thousands from the disease every year (fifty-five thousand, in the estimate of the World Health Organization).”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“There is a small worm in a dog’s tongue…: if this is removed from the animal while a pup, it will never become mad or lose its appetite. This worm, after being carried thrice round a fire, is given to persons who have been bitten by a mad dog, to prevent them from becoming mad. This madness, too, is prevented by eating a cock’s brains; but the virtue of these brains lasts for one year only, and no more. They say, too, that a cock’s comb, pounded, is highly efficacious as an application to the wound; as also, goose-grease, mixed with honey. The flesh also of a mad dog is sometimes salted, and taken with the food, as a remedy for this disease. In addition to this, young puppies of the same sex as the dog that has inflicted the injury, are drowned in water, and the person who has been bitten eats their liver raw. The dung of poultry, provided it is of a red colour, is very useful, applied with vinegar; the ashes, too, of the tail of a shrew-mouse, if the animal has survived and been set at liberty; a clod from a swallow’s nest, applied with vinegar; the young of a swallow, reduced to ashes; or the skin or old slough of a serpent that has been cast in spring, beaten up with a male crab in wine.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“During the past twenty years, raccoons have become the U.S. species most frequently found to be infected with rabies.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“From the pathogen’s perspective, humans are what epidemiologists call an “accidental host” of many zoonoses, meaning that the pathogen usually fails to complete its life cycle in man alone. In other words, it can “afford” (evolutionarily speaking) to kill humans at staggering rates, because its natural reservoir is elsewhere.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“the expression “six feet under” originated from a London health ordinance during the plague of 1665 there, with the famous prescription intended to keep men from being unearthed by man’s best friend.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“With most zoonotic leaps in disease, animal contact is the spark, but urbanization is the bone-dry tinder; a newly evolved pathogen can’t spread from person to person, after all, unless people run across one another in the first place.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Not uncommonly, male patients succumb to an even more lurid sort of abandon. The virus’s action on the limbic system of the brain can cause them to exhibit hypersexual behavior: increased desire, involuntary erections, and even orgasms, sometimes occurring at a rate of once per hour.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Fevers spike high during this final phase of the disease. The mouth salivates profusely. Tears stream from the eyes. Goose bumps break out on the skin. Cries of agony, as expressed through a spasming throat, can produce the impression of an almost animal bark. In the throes of their convulsions, patients have even been known to bite. They also hallucinate.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Fittingly, the rabies virus is shaped like a bullet: a cylindrical shell of glycoproteins and lipids that carries, in its rounded tip, a malevolent payload of helical RNA. On entering a living thing, it eschews the bloodstream, the default route of nearly all viruses but a path heavily guarded by immuno-protective sentries. Instead, like almost no other virus known to science, rabies sets its course through the nervous system, creeping upstream at one to two centimeters per day (on average) through the axoplasm, the transmission lines that conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“Scientists theorize that the indispensable hearth of domestication was the human garbage pile, with the wolves that scavenged there some fifteen thousand years ago becoming gradually more tame.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“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.”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus