Mad Dogs and Englishmen Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (review)

This study of rabies in the nineteenth century (with a nod to the twentieth) follows the “interactions between medical, veterinary, government, and public knowledge and attitudes to rabies and hydrophobia…” (p. 2) It is a study of medical and social history of class, institutional history of policing and legal institutions, cultural history in the role the dogs played in the British national psyche, and ultimately, the history of Britain’s struggle to merge into an international community rather than stand alone as an island nation. As a result, Pemberton and Worboys’s study is fascinating, revealing the complexities of a nation struggling to understand and cope with increasingly complex relationships affecting custom and norms. How the British tried to understand disease, the new scientific basis for infectious diseases passing between species and breakthroughs in medical knowledge and treatment, are all themes in this history. The study of rabies not only allows the reader to get some appreciation in advancements in medical and veterinary research in the nineteenth century, but it also examines how the increasing power of the state was debated among the public. While dog controls intended to limit animal disease that might affect humans was one thing, state controls of animal ownership, regulated by economics and geographical location, were perceived as unreasonable encroachments on personal liberty. Still, rabies helped formalize the proper role for dogs, specifically as pets and working animals rather than figures in sports and entertainment industries.

But just as prominent are the changing traditional relationships between people of differing socio-economic classes, educational levels, and authority, on the one hand, and the their telling relationship to their dogs, on the other. As a result, the book also looks at other conditions of the nineteenth century that contributed to these changing perceptions of class, gender, power, and xenophobia in Victorian Britain. The understanding of the British paranoia about rabies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a very complex story, going far beyond medical and social history. It ultimately starts and ends with the class-crossing phenomenon that defies logical explanation: humans’ love for and unwillingness to inflict injury upon their species’ best friend - dogs.

The growing problem of rabies in Great Britain, or “canine madness,” culminated in the year 1830. The press reported and Home Secretary Robert Peel acknowledged that growing terror among the public that thousands of stray dogs, abandoned by the poor on the streets of London, were randomly attacking and biting individuals throughout the city, spreading the madness of hydrophobia through their saliva. Doctors, failing to understand scientific connections (or lack thereof) between the canine disease and the human fear known as hydrophobia, misconnected the symptoms and reported to the press and government agencies alike that eradication of the stray dogs as the best means of preserving public health. Though some medical men attempted to study the virus and seek out a preventative methods short of destroying dogs, namely through some sort of inoculation, hysteria grew so much that new laws were enacted that regulated dog ownership and the behaviors of dogs and their owners alike. Canine madness, connected to dogs of the poor and breeds of dogs most commonly owned by the working classes of urban cities, were to be destroyed if found on the streets, whether showing signs of illness or not.

No medical or veterinary science differing from prevailing interpretations made any headway in educating the public or the Home Office. Stray dogs were to be destroyed if not claimed when rounded up by police and all breeds were to be muzzled when walked in the cities by their owners. Falling as a heavy financial burden on many working class dog owners, still more dogs were abandoned and fell victim to regulations, whether or not they showed any signs of disease. Such regulatory behavior seemed to assuage the public and the crisis of rabies and hydrophobia was temporarily over.

The next phase of this history saw rabies outbreaks, significantly lower than...