Lore 224: Seriously Ill

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If you've been a listener of this show long enough, you'll be very familiar with just how often archaeologists make amazing discoveries.

And sure, I'm fully willing to admit that those new finds are rarely as exciting as the stuff we see in Hollywood hits such as the Indiana Jones films.

Truth be told, a lot of them might even be considered boring by many of us.

Sometimes though, archaeologists can help us see past the mundane surface stuff to notice the special thing that's hidden beneath, which is what one discovery from over a century ago required.

It's a grave, uncovered in Germany back in 1914.

And while that's not unusual in general, the particular collection of occupants in this burial paints an important picture.

As far as experts can determine, the grave is over 14,000 years old, dating back to the Paleolithic era.

Inside it were the bodies of both a man and a woman, but also something else.

A puppy.

And while that's a combination that seems familiar and typical to our modern ears, historians think it's one of the earliest known examples of the domestication of dogs.

I love my dog.

If you grew up with one or have one in your house now, you know exactly what I mean.

They provide companionship and assistance and thanks to the TikTok generation, a nearly endless supply of funny videos to laugh along with.

Dogs often end up being more than just a pet.

They become a part of our family or community.

But no relationship is without risk.

With other people, we might fall out over a disagreement or just grow apart.

And when it comes to living with animals, one of those risks can be disease.

It's a complex subject for sure, but one that deserves a bit of exploration, if only through the specific and entertaining lens of folk magic.

Because throughout history, those who have interacted with dogs also had to navigate the murky, dangerous waters of something that made everyone around them feel very, very unsafe.

It's time for us to discuss the folklore of rabies.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

I think it needs to be said up front: rabies is a complex topic.

There's a lot of nuance and science involved, and it clearly impacts more non-human animals than just dogs.

But there's a lot about it that strays into the realm of folklore, so that will be our focus today.

One thing that I found surprising about this branch of folklore is just how ancient it really is.

In fact, the earliest known records that talk about rabies are 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablets.

These tablets in particular describe the monetary fines that a dog owner would need to pay if their rabid dog caused the death of another person.

Which, if you put the pieces together, also means that even 4,000 years ago, folks already understood the connection between a dog's bite and the sick person.

But those tablets also included the thing that we'll find all throughout the pages of history, folk remedies that claim to get rid of the illness.

It seems the Sumerians used something called dog incantations, essentially dog-focused spells that were meant to be spoken over water, which was then drank by the infected person.

The ancient Greeks had a lot to say about rabies too.

There's this old myth about a hunter named Actaeon who was caught spying on the goddess Artemis while she was bathing naked in a lake.

Artemis spots him and in her anger she transforms him into a stag.

And then Lysa, the goddess of rage and madness, sets his own dogs upon him who tear him apart.

Lyssa, by the way, was more than just the goddess of rage and madness.

She was also the goddess of rabies.

And of course, all of the Greek and Roman writers you've probably heard of from Aristotle and Virgil to Ovid and Pliny the Elder all wrote about rabies.

Pliny in particular referred to it as dog tongue worm because at the time the disease was believed to be transmitted by a worm that lived beneath the dog's tongue.

Most of that ancient writing though focused on curing the disease in both the humans and their dogs.

For example, Pliny believed that that worm could be surgically removed from beneath a dog's tongue.

Then it was supposed to be given to the infected person to hold on to as they walked around a fire three times.

Pliny also suggested that a good way to prevent rabies was to drink a mixture of badger and swallow feces that had been boiled down into a sludge.

Now, I can make a joke about that being a crappy idea, but I'd rather point out how desperate that remedy makes them sound.

Think about it, rabies was such a frightening thing that people would literally drink warm animal crap to ward it off.

And look, I'll be honest with you, there's a part of me that wanted to scrap the rest of my outline for this episode and just fill the next 30 minutes with all of the crazy remedies that were promoted over the centuries.

It would be fun, believe me, but there's so much more to cover.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to mention just a few more.

For example, there was a Greek philosopher in the second century named Celsus who recommended throwing rabies patients into a deep pond.

He claimed that it did two things.

It would satisfy the intense thirst that infected people suffered, and it would also supposedly cure them of another common symptom of the disease, the fear of water.

And 1500 years later, there were still people who believed that it was an effective cure.

In fact, there are records of practitioners in England advertising their dipping skills as late as 1735, which proves two things, how gullible people have always been and how much people still feared rabies.

Other treatments recommended in the past included the old Roman prescription to eat the brain of a rooster or the medieval European remedy of a pill made from the ground-up skull of an executed criminal.

Some cures fell into the topical category, working like a sort of magical lotion.

One recommendation was to mix honey with goose grease and rub that on the dog bite.

Others said it should be honey and burned cow bones.

My favorite though would be the recipe for a poultice made of burned pig dung and olive oil, which must have smelled amazing.

And let's not forget the always popular talisman.

One writer called for the tail of a weasel, but only if the weasel survived and had been set free.

Others recommended a dog's heart or a dog's tongue, which probably harkens back to that old Roman idea that Pliny the Elder gave us.

There was even a 12th century legend in Syria that claimed that there was a mysterious dog well out there somewhere.

Anyone who had been bitten by a rabid dog had 40 days to travel there and drink from its waters if they wanted to survive.

Like I said, I could go on and on about these folk remedies, but I hope the biggest message is clear.

For thousands of years, across cultures and continents, people have been aware that rabies could be passed on to humans by their dogs.

And in every instance, that realization was addressed with the full measure of imagination and creativity.

Along the way, though, something else was being spread.

And if history is any indication, it was far more dangerous than the disease itself: an epidemic of fear.

Fear makes people do some pretty strange things.

I could give you a bunch of historical examples of that, but truth be told, our present-day society already has enough.

Fear is a motivator, an engine that drives us towards something darker.

And in the world of rabies, there are two good examples of that.

First up, we have Saint Hubert.

He was an 8th-century bishop who lived and worked in Belgium.

And like all saints, he had quite the origin story.

It's said that during a sermon one Sunday morning, Hubert looked up to see a man stagger into his church.

The stranger was foaming at the mouth, snarling like a dog and growling uncontrollably.

When this madman started chasing after the worshipers gathered in the church, Hubert stepped in.

It's said that he approached the stranger and uttered a simple command, may the Lord Jesus heal you.

And in that instant, he was.

Ever since, Hubert has been known as the patron saint of hunters and the healing of rabies, which of course was made all the more popular by the fear that people felt toward the disease.

Even in Hubert's own lifetime, infected and dying people were making pilgrimages to see him for healing, and that fear transformed his work into something else entirely.

It's said that Hubert had a special stole, a kind of scarf that priests wear over their shoulders, and the cure that he offered infected patients was to pluck a thread from that stole, make an incision on their forehead, and insert the thread inside.

The wound was then bound up and they were sent on their way, supposedly healed.

This stole, by the way, never got smaller, no matter how many threads were pulled out of it, and it was so famous and revered that it was kept in a locked chest, one that required six separate keys, owned by six respected individuals, to open.

Remember, we're talking about fear of an infectious disease here.

People leaned hard on their faith and on Saint Hubert in particular, which is why in the centuries after his death, the idea of St.

Hubert's key became another solution to chase after.

In person, the key was heated up and used to cauterize the wound.

But later on, the monks of St.

Hubert's Abbey began to issue their own small copies, usually shaped like a cross or a nail.

All someone had to do was hang the object on their wall to protect their house from rabies.

All that, because of fear.

But an even more powerful example of fear took place a lot more recently in the grand scheme of things, and it all started in New York City back in the 1870s.

Even then, it was a bustling metropolis that was bursting at the seams.

Life wasn't necessarily easy back then, and between crime and disease, folks had to fight to stay safe, and that included fighting rabies.

In the 1870s, a new fad swept the city.

Women, mostly of German origin, started keeping Pomeranians, chow chows, and a handful of other breeds as ladies' pets.

And because of the German connection, all of these dogs were lumped under a single slur.

People simply refer to them by the German word for pointed, spitz.

Why is this important?

Well, it seems that someone started a rumor that the spits was the primary cause of rabies in New York City, and therefore must be eradicated.

There was a lot of fear behind this idea too.

Fear of immigrants, fear of feminism, and of course fear of rabies.

Lumping them all together made a sick sort of sense to them.

The result was horrific.

Articles began to appear in the New York Times that promoted this idea.

One of them, from May of 1876, was titled A White Canine Sepulchre.

Here's one quote of its propaganda, just as an example.

So far as morality is concerned, the Spitz is thoroughly and irredeemably corrupt.

He is a tireless and shameless thief and exhibits a perverted skill in obtaining access to forbidden cellars and in stealing the reserved bones of honest and frugal dogs, which is truly vulpine.

It went on to mention the Spitz's conspicuous addiction to rabies.

Yes, the author was assigning morality to dogs and drawing a line between good breeds and bad ones.

Not bad because of training or the influence of their owners, bad because of their genetic code.

And it only snowballed from there.

In a November 1876 article titled A Venomous Beast, the author declared that there were four truly venomous animals in the United States.

The rattlesnake, the copperhead, the moccasin, and of course, the spitz.

Venomous in the sense, of course, that its bite was the primary cause of rabies in New York.

Over time, more and more articles like it were being published.

Soon enough, people were calling for action.

Up north in Boston, there were heated arguments in the Massachusetts Statehouse about the risk this dog breed imposed on society.

Others called for mass extermination, and while there were more than a few instances of communities taking matters into their own hands to follow through on that idea, I'm not going to discuss them here.

What's important to see, though, is the larger power play at work.

Fear had a way of making people less compassionate, less critical of wild assumptions, and a lot more prone to using violence as a means to an end.

Rabies had been plaguing dogs and their owners for thousands of years, and even by the late 19th century, it still had power.

And yet, there's one more unusual corner of Arabies folklore that I want to tell you about.

This one ventures away from the world of public disinformation and animal violence, and into the realm of magic.

Everyone understands the power of touch, and while it can deliver comfort or pain, folklore is filled with stories that hint at another strong desire for a simple touch to heal us.

Enter lithotherapy.

That's the use of stones or stone-like objects to treat an injury or an illness.

And while that might sound like something that you'd find in a modern spa, it's actually a practice that dates back to the Middle Ages with with a wild folkloric twist.

One early example of lithotherapy comes in the form of snake stones.

These were small stone-like objects that were said to come from the head of a snake, and they could be used to draw the venom out of a snake bite.

A person would just place the dry stone against the wound, and it would magically stick and begin to suck out the poison.

Once it was filled up, all you had to do was drop the snake stone into milk, preferably human breast milk, according to the folklore, and the poison would be pulled out, making the stone ready for another application.

Just be sure to dump out that milk, which would have turned green if the process had worked properly.

People were obsessed with snake stones.

They might have started in Europe, but by the 1740s they were already being advertised over here in America.

And as we've learned over the years that we've been exploring folklore together, people love to line up and hand over their cash for magical solutions.

Some historians though think that the snake stone might have helped give birth to another kind of of healing rock and it was known as a madstone.

This was essentially a bezor, a calcified hairball that had been removed from the stomach or intestines of a deer.

And if that deer had been an albino, all the better.

The proper use of a madstone was pretty similar to that of a snake stone, except instead of treating snake bites, they were placed against the wound caused by the bite of a rabid dog.

The dry stone would cause a sucking sensation when attached and would be recharged by giving it a soak in warm milk.

Some people even claim to see bubbles in the milk, proof, they say, that it was working.

But these weren't items that you could stroll down to your local apothecary and just buy.

Madstones were incredibly rare, and most of the time they were kept within a family, passing down from generation to generation, like some sort of relic from the past, which meant that there were only a few known to exist, and they could be pinpointed to specific locations.

One famous madstone was said to be located in Savannah, Missouri.

Locals claimed that it had been used to cure around 500 people.

They described it as oblong-shaped, maybe an inch long, and reddish-brown with streaks of white.

There were even visible pores on the surface, sort of like coral, which fits the Bezor descriptions to a T.

There was also one in Kansas City.

Legend says that this one came over from Ireland and had been in the family since the 1730s.

Theirs was small, pale orange, and again, slightly porous like a sponge.

And so was the one located in Dyer, Indiana, which was flat and wedge-shaped and smooth from constant use over the years.

But at the top of that list was the most famous one of all, the Terre Hope Madstone.

It was rumored that it had been used to cure over 1,300 people and had a reported success rate of 100%.

Every single time someone came looking for help with a bite from a rabid dog, those patients walked away healed.

And we know it was famous all across the Midwest because of one particular story written down by a man named Joseph Gillespie.

He described how one day in the 1850s, an attorney from Springfield, Illinois fell into a panic when his teenage son was attacked by a rabbit dog, and there wasn't much time to lose before things became dire.

Ignoring the fact that Springfield had plenty of doctors who were ready and waiting to help, Gillespie said that this man took his son on a 100-mile journey to Terre Haute, Indiana.

Why?

Because he believed that the legendary Madstone there was his best option.

Even in a world of science, folklore still had its allure.

And it worked.

The man's son Robert got the treatment that he needed by the owner of the Madstone and never once developed the symptoms of rabies.

He went on to live a long and healthy life, passing away at the ripe old age of 82.

His father, the lawyer, wasn't so lucky.

He eventually got into politics, which took him away from the Midwest and out to Washington, D.C.

And maybe a decade or so after his desperate search for the Madstone, he was killed by an assassin's bullet.

The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

Have you ever heard the phrase the dog days of summer?

Some historians think that its roots are found in the Roman belief that rabies infections were more likely to occur during the months when the star called Sirius was high in the the sky.

Sirius, of course, is also known as the dog star because of its location in the constellation Canis Major, or the greater dog.

As I said at the beginning, rabies is a complex topic.

While dogs aren't the only animals that can become infected and pass it on through their bite, that particular connection has been the primary one most cultures have focused on throughout the centuries.

And when a fear is left to fester for as long as that of rabies, bad things can happen.

For every delightfully awful remedy scribbled down by some ancient Roman writer, there have been more desperate and horrific responses.

Fear is a motivator that sadly leans toward the cruel and conspiratorial.

One of the reasons the history of rabies is fascinating is because you can sort of follow along as it clings to the timeline of world history, never really letting go.

Those 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablets held just as much fear as the New York Times headlines from the 1870s.

From cuneiform to the printing press, nothing had really changed.

Until that is, one day in July of 1885, that was when Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist, injected a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister with something new and different, a vaccination.

Just like Abraham Lincoln, Joseph's parents had lived a long way from Paris, but had heard rumors of Pasteur's legendary healing powers, so they had made the trip.

And it worked.

Joseph made a full recovery, and the vaccine was proven effective and ready to distribute.

But the availability of medicine wasn't as seemingly instant as it is today, and most of the world would have to wait many more months, which was time that one doctor did not think he had.

Dr.

William O'Gorman was a well-respected New Jersey physician who had a problem on his hands.

It seems that a dog, one that was assumed to have rabies, mind you, had attacked six young boys in Newark.

And while O'Gorman had heard news of pasteur's vaccination he didn't have access to it so he asked the public to pitch in and gather the funds necessary to put the four boys who had suffered the worst onto a steamship bound for France it would cost roughly one thousand dollars a massive sum in those days but thanks to a lot of generous people including Andrew Carnegie they pulled it off the boys made the journey They were treated by Louis Pasteur himself and returned home a month later with a clean bill of health.

Most of the time, folklore has a way of making communities do horrible things.

From the hanging of witches to the treatment of outsiders, traditional beliefs have powered deadly reactions to all sorts of fears.

But thankfully, as the story of Dr.

O'Gorman and his young patients illustrates so nicely, there are moments when rumor and speculation unite a community behind something good and right.

Fear might still have been their motivator, but they used it to change the world for the better.

A lesson, I think, that we could all do well to remember.

I'll be the first to admit, as a dog owner myself, today's folklore was a bit challenging to sift through.

The stories, the traditions, the fear, all of it seems to paint our canine companions in a bad light.

But not all dogs have gone down in history for causing harm to the people around them.

Most have done the opposite, and a few have even inspired us humans to greatness.

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Most of the time, there are two camps.

Those things over over there are dangerous to the people around them while that other group is beneficial.

But that's the problem with thinking only in black and white terms.

You miss out on the exceptions.

And during World War I, one of those exceptions made a name for himself.

Robert J.

Conroy was like a lot of young men in 1917.

He probably had better plans for himself, but he was ready to serve in the conflict growing across the Atlantic.

He was assigned to the 102nd Infantry and soon boarded a ship that was bound for France.

I imagine that he brought along some photos of his loved ones or maybe a family Bible or a lock of someone's hair.

Those are all guesses though.

What we know for sure is that he definitely came with something small and furry, a little bull terrier named Stubby.

Now, dogs weren't allowed on military ships at the time, so bringing Stubby along required some creative thinking.

Conroy snuck him in under his coat and ended up hiding the dog in his coal bin, hoping that no one would notice.

But soon enough, his commanding officer found out and allowed the pup to stay.

Once in France, Conroy and his fellow soldiers found themselves in the trenches trading bullets and bombs with the German forces across the battlefield and Stubby was right there with them running through the mayhem and madness learning as he went.

It's said that after an exposure to an early gas attack, Stubby learned to equate the smell with danger and it gave him the ability to bark at the people around him to warn them of new gas attacks before it was too late.

Now I'm not quite quite sure who taught Stubby to do this, but he reportedly learned to salute just like the humans around him.

If someone saluted him, he would raise his right paw and place it above his right eye for a moment.

It was just one more reason why the men in those trenches began to see Stubby as more than just a dog.

And sure, he couldn't carry a weapon, but Stubby found other ways to be helpful.

He was known to run out into no man's land and find injured soldiers and then bark until someone came to help.

He also had a few encounters with German soldiers who had gotten a bit too close to the French lines and attacked them until backup arrived.

Stubby was richly rewarded for his efforts too.

A commander of the 102nd actually promoted him to sergeant, making Stubby the first dog ever to be given a rank in the U.S.

military.

Ever since, he's been known as Sergeant Stubby, and honestly, it was exactly what he deserved.

And his legend only grew exponentially by the American victory in the war, and he returned to the U.S.

as a hero and maybe a sort of mascot for all those GIs who fought so bravely.

Newspapers sang his praises and that fame even earned him a medal from General John J.

Persing along with an audience with multiple US presidents.

One thing that I can't help but think about is how Stubby acted like a sort of magical talisman or madstone for the entire country.

While stories that came out of the Western front were littered with the pain and suffering of human carnage, poison gas, amputations, and all sorts of other grim realities, Stubby was there to give people something to smile about.

He delivered healing by sucking the horror from the wound of war and helping people find hope instead.

When Sergeant Stubby passed away in 1926, the New York Times printed his obituary and praised him for all to read.

A fitting tribute for sure, but also an important reversal for the newspaper.

After all, just 50 years earlier, they had been instrumental in the rise of anti-dog hatred and abuse.

A reminder that, for as powerful as folklore and legend have always been, we have just as much power today to set the record straight.

This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

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And as always, thanks for listening.

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