Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus [Kindle Edition]

Bill Wasik (Author), Monica Murphy (Author)

Book Description

A maddened creature, frothing at the mouth, lunges at an innocent victim—and, with a bite, transforms its prey into another raving monster. It’s a scenario that underlies our darkest tales of supernatural horror, but its power derives from a very real virus, a deadly scourge known to mankind from our earliest days. In this fascinating exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years in the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies.

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies kills nearly 100 percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. A disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans, rabies has served throughout history as a symbol of savage madness, of inhuman possession. And today, its history can help shed light on the wave of emerging diseases, from AIDS to SARS to avian flu, that we now know to originate in animal populations. 

From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh, fascinating, and often wildly entertaining look at one of mankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes. 

Editorial Reviews

Review

''An elegant exploration of the science behind one of the most horrible ways to die.'' --Chris Anderson, New York Times bestselling author

''Thrilling, smart, and devilishly entertaining, Rabid is one of those books that changes your sense of history -- and reminds us how much our human story has been shaped by the viruses that live among us.'' --Steven Johnson, bestselling author of The Ghost Map

''Take Bill Wasik, one of our most perceptive journalistic storytellers, have him join forces with Monica Murphy, scholar of public health, and you end up with this erudite, true-life creep show of a book. It turns out that the rabies virus is a good bit more fascinating and at least as frightening as any of those blood-thirsty monsters that have stalked our fairy tales, multiplexes, and dreams.'' --Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck

''The rabies virus is a microscopic particle of genes and proteins. And yet it has cast a fearful shadow over all of human history. Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have produced an eerily elegant meditation on disease and madness, dogs and vampires. It's as infectious as its subject.'' --Carl Zimmer, NPR contributor and author of Parasite Rex

About the Author

BILL WASIK is a senior editor at Wired magazine and was previously a senior editor at Harper's, where he wrote on culture, media, and politics. He is the editor of the anthology Submersion Journalism and has also written for the Oxford American, Slate, Salon, and McSweeney's.

MONICA MURPHY holds degrees in public health from Johns Hopkins University and veterinary medicine from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Oakland, California.

Product Details

• File Size: 1248 KB
• Print Length: 287 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0670023736
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (July 19, 2012)
• Sold by: Penguin Publishing
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0072NWKG0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,284 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Internal Medicine > Infectious Disease > Communicable Diseases
  • #67 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Infectious Disease > Communicable Diseases

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars parts are a chore, but final chapters great July 23, 2012

By Madame X TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

It is unfortunate that Rabid's best chapters fall at the end of the book. I loved reading about Louis Pasteur's experiments and the rabies outbreak in Bali. The author, Bill Wasik, finally has real personalities to work with, real scientific challenges to chronicle, real stories to tell. After slogging through the first two-thirds of Rabid I perked up and found myself thinking, "Well, most of this book was a chore to read but this...this!...would make a great magazine article."

And if that sounds like damning by faint praise, well...it's meant to. Rabid is not one of those books whose defined, narrow subject cuts an exciting trail through the vastness of history. It tries to be. It traces the emergence of rabies from ancient Egypt to the present, it grapples with the cultural history of animal domestication, the interplay between cultural prejudice and scientific discovery, the forward march of science and the sheer power of fear.

It would be awesome, except that it isn't. Huge chunks of the book are very academic, dense, factual prose. Which is interesting if the author has some revolutionary argument to make. Some brilliant idea to frame and polish. Wasik is just cataloguing what seems to be every single historical mention of rabies ever. I felt like I was reading an earnest undergraduate paper and I pitied all of my former professors.

The closer that Wasik gets to the present the more interesting his material. He's got chops enough to make the story of rabies in the modern world pretty fascinating - everything from Louis Pasteur to the present is great. All of a sudden he's writing narrative non-fiction of the kind I like most, where there's a story and characters, challenges to overcome, anecdotes to relate.

There's some good stuff in here, but I'd only recommend the book to people who are either (a) deeply, deeply interested in rabies or (b) really guiltless about skimming the boring bits.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Horrifying - and compelling - look at a dark human fear July 19, 2012

By Nathan Webster TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have explored the disease in "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus."

"Diabolic," defined as a characteristic of the devil, is a good word to use. The almost always-fatal (if untreated) virus renders its victims 'hydrophobic' - terrified of water. As the victims mind devolves into a virus-ravaged insanity, whatever personality once held by the person or animal disappears, replaced by a no-doubt devilish incoherence and rage.

Every 'zombie' movie basically has rabies as the model - an untreatable disease where killing the victim even before the disease's onset is considered the humane course of action. The authors use examples of Will Smith's "I Am Legend," where his character kills his dog, his only friend, as soon as a rabies-like condition presents itself, and "Old Yeller," the frontier tragedy, which saw the title character unfairly suffer the same fate.

"Rabies" is written as a cultural history, much more than a medical journal or report. It's mostly third-person, until the end. The authors do dwell on various treatment options - and a chapter is given to Louis Pastuer's discovery of the rabies vacciene. But their primary goal is showing how this disease has factored into various cultural fears for hundreds of years.

Even without much true scientific knowledge, the doctors of the Middle Ages and before could still see the link between a 'mad' dog's bite, and the similar, fatal condition that the victim might then suffer. The terror of such a ghastly disease - with such an obvious and common cause - would clearly have made it far more horrible than an equally fatal flu or cancer, where no such link existed.

The authors look into recent British fears about the English Channel Tunnel connecting England and France, and how this new landline might open the island of England to a rabies epidemic.

Which did recently occur in the island of Bali, the authors relate, where an inefficient and poorly executed dog-'culling' program was the response to an epidemic created when one rabid dog arrived on the island. Dozens of Bali, Indonesia citizens died of the disease despite the treatment options - in an island with no recorded rabies cases, nobody believed it could happen.

While at first I wasn't interested in a lengthy chapter that dealt with human's longstanding relationship with dogs, I soon realized that our love and sometimes mistreatment of our dogs comes from our own societal roots. We know that a good dog is loyal and friendly to a fault, but behind the playful eyes is our subconcious knowledge they sometimes carry this humanity-stripping disease.

Just as dogs have been hardwired with a domestic influence over thousands of years, it's fair to say that our cultural reliance on rabies-based horror choices came from generations of this back-of-the-mind fear of an animal we take for granted - until their bite drives us insane.

It is not a "fun" book, but it is exciting and horrifiying, and that does make it compelling and interesting.

This review is based on a complimentary advance review copy.

35 of 44 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good and Worthwhile Book July 19, 2012

By Kenneth E. MacWilliams

Format:Hardcover

This is the second book about the history of a specific medical scourge that I have read in the past year and one half. The first was Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize winning "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" (please see my Amazon review). With "Rapid" I hoped for a second such extraordinary and wonderful ride. What came most to mind though is what Senator Lloyd Bentsen replied to Senator Dan Quayle during the 1988 vice-presidential debate: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

That's a somewhat unfair comparison though, and it's not to say that "Rabid" is not a good book, because it is. It's simply that few books can match "Emperor". "Rapid" is just exactly what its husband and wife authors William Wasik, senior editor of Wired Magazine and veterinarian Monica Murphy say it is -- "a cultural history". "Rapid" saves you doing an internet search using such search words and phrases as "Rabies", "Rabies in Popular Culture", "Rabies History", "Rabies Historical Timeline" and then exploring the many resultant links. And then it pulls all of these play-by-play results together for you, sifts and organizes and edits them, expands a bit on them in some key places, and throws in a lot of juicy color commentary along the way. From the emergence of this horrible problem of rabies at the dawn of mankind and mythology, on down to its scientific discovery and cure, and then on to current medical practice, the authors spread across their book's landscape multiple tales of madness and its often grotesque consequences including how it rears its ugly and frightening head so often in literature.

Do you remember years ago the very long, in depth pieces The New Yorker used to publish on various narrow subjects which were of great interest to those who were already interested in or curious about the subject? Sometimes they were so long they were carried in two parts, over two issues. I think "Rabies" would have been a terrific candidate for such a long piece and William Shawn would have dedicated the space and the needed editorial guidance.

Looked at from that perspective "Rabid" is really pretty good, though stylistically it felt uneven. The second half of the book is more gripping than the first which is almost super-saturated with facts and sometimes was a hard slog for me. Nevertheless, it is easy to skim over those parts, flying at the 15,000 feet level, quickly surveying the territory below, and then slowing down and diving down to 500 feet or maybe even to land temporarily when at various points the book's review of the march of the historical and cultural timeline of rabies sufficiently attracts you.

If you are a reader with only passing and somewhat cursory interest in this subject, and if even at that you are more interested in the historical and cultural aspects of rabies than the medical, I would tell you that it would certainly be worth your while to read this book because the overall subject of rabies itself is fascinating. But I would add the caution that you should be careful not to get bogged down in any one part of it that seems slow. For such a reader I would give it four stars. However, if you are a lay reader keenly interested in medicine and medical science, and in viruses and rabies in particular, then for you I would rate it three stars and I would suggest that you read "Emperor" first if you have not already done so. But since I can only give one rating, and because the subject of rabies is so important, I give "Rabid" an overall four stars.

Kenneth E. MacWilliams
Portland, Maine

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