Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 by Jessica Wang (review)

Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 By Jessica Wang. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 344 pages, 10 halftones, 6" x 9". $54.95 cloth, $54.95 ebook.

Between 1840 and 1920, New York City's human population grew from three hundred thousand to over five million, a significant growth accompanied and catalyzed by expanding transportation and communications networks. This period was also one in which the city became a space within which animals—dogs, in particular—roamed city streets alongside humans. The relationship was not always symbiotic, and when "wild" dogs were identified as sources of an untreatable fatal disease, certain networks of people within the city—ranging from medical professionals to animal rights advocates—took disparate actions with the same objective: to prevent the transmission of rabies from dogs to humans. Such is the subject of Jessica Wang's Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920. Wang captures an era in New York's history within which concerns raised by an "anthrozootic city" were exemplified by rabid animals and the discourse surrounding the threat to humans posed by such animals (11).

Wang analyzes how rabies shaped New York public's imagination of the disease, how efforts to regulate dogs were debated and practiced to stop the spread of a most feared disease, and how these considerations were all shaped and informed by altering notions of medicine. Analyzing the medical history of rabies and the social discourse surrounding rabies in late nineteenth-century New York, Wang argues, enhances historical understandings of a vast array of historical fields, including the history of rabies, of dogs in urban spaces, of transformations in medical practice, and of politicization of threats to public health. Wang's work may be fairly categorized as a sociocultural history of medicine, urban space, New York City, animals, science and technology, and politics, and though the author capably traces the discourse surrounding rabies within the historiographical context of the aforementioned fields, the monograph as a singular project is not a historiographically significant work within one of these fields. But (and stay with me), the work is a feat for just this reason: that Wang capably navigates within, and connects, many distinct fields of history through a single lens is an achievement that should not be dismissed or minimized by virtue of the work's not wholly contextualizing every question (historiographical or other) it raises. If this book disappoints a historian of medicine for not being singularly a history of medicine, then, in this reviewer's opinion, it succeeded in illustrating the remarkable array of issues that rabies affected and the number of actors that rabies inspired to act in distinct ways.

Wang primarily uses newspaper accounts to trace reactions to the spread of rabies, which she notes outweighed by an astounding scale the threat rabies actually posed to the American public. Wang presents these stories as short anecdotes. Her style does not drastically vary throughout her work, but the elements of—and characters in—the book underscore Wang's argument that rabies captured the attention and imagination of a nation.

Wang's expert utilization of short narratives drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts serve to make Mad Dogs an approachable, engaging, and readable monograph. Wang's work reads alternatingly as a book that sees itself as a popular text for those interested in New York history and an academic work that seeks to move forward the fields of medical history, social history, cultural history, and anthrozoology. Regrettably, Mad Dogs fails to identify how it operates to impact these fields.

Wang captures New Yorkers' voices primarily from periodicals written by and quoting city residents. Due to limitations of her methodology, dogs remain the acted-upon...