from the pen of icarus blake

I finished Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus a couple days ago.  It’s a book I was looking forward to, given how prominent rabies is in our culture and how intensely its intertwined in horror fiction and folklore — ranging from parallels with vampire and werewolf lore to influencing the behavior of zombies during the last zombie boom of the 2010s.  As a virus, rabies holds a special place in my heart as one of the most terrifying real-life things that can happen to a person, right down to the 99.999 (repeating)% fatality rate.

Unfortunately, Rabid disappointed me.

This book fell into the same pitfalls as other books that I read — and through no fault of its own!  Rabid is an excellent entry point for the cultural history of rabies as both a virus and a concept.  It spends a great deal of time talking about the process of discovering a vaccine and exploring case studies of its spread and control on a population level.  I had simply built it up in my mind — something I also did with Your Inner Fish — and failed to take into account that my intense thirst for knowledge means that I already know a lot of the more basic material within the book.

Something that I can’t chock up to my own prior knowledge is the tendency of Rabid to mention a deeply interesting case of rabies in the cultural zeitgeist and then NEVER ADDRESS IT.  While describing the Milwaukee Protocol and its uses in the treatment of rabies, the authors give a passing mention to multiple cases of rabies contracted in immunocompromised individuals from organ donation.  They don’t go into it, this thing that deserves an entire chapter, and give it a sentence at most.  

Nevermind the medical implications of contracting rabies through a donor liver, what about the culture that is so blind to rabies as a possibility that it isn’t even tested for in a donor that died of some neurological ailment?  What about a medical establishment so stuck on the idea of horses that the worst-case-scenario Kelpie is never even ruled out?  Has this happened before?  Will it happen again?  What protocols were put in place to prevent it, or was it just a fluke?  I feel like this kind of thing would send ripples through the medical community, but it just was not talked about at all.  Do I have to write my own book on this?  What the fuck, man, how can you just not talk about it at all????