Abstract
Between 1830 and 1860 rabies was overshadowed by wider problems in pubic health and public order. Public health became dominated by zymotic diseases, especially epidemic diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and typhus, which contemporaries understood to be mostly generated by filth and malign conditions, and to be spread by aerial miasmas.1 Hydrophobia was classed as a zymotic disease, though like syphilis spread by contact contagion. The fight against epidemics was led by so-called sanitarians who emphasised aerial transmission of disease poisons and focused on the physical environment, principally the water supply, sewage, and nuisance removal; in their view few important diseases seemed to be spread by direct contagion.2 Public order became political order, first in the reform crisis of 1830–1832, then in the introduction of the New Poor Law, and then the Chartist campaigns, which seemed to some contemporaries to threaten revolution.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On zymotic diseases see M. Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 34–42.
C. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–54, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
C. Otter, ‘Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 2004, 43: 40–64.
Smithfield and its livestock market was already a place of notoriety for cruelty to animals. See D. Donald, ‘Beastly Sights’: The Treatment of Animals as a Moral Theme in Representations of London c. 1820–50’, Art History, 1999, 22: 514–44.
B. Harrison, ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England’, English Historical Review, 1973, 88: 786–820.
W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Berkley: University of California Press, 1986.
Bill to Amend Acts for More Effectual Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Parl. Papers, 1854, (106), ii, 145–49. See M. Radford, Animal Welfare Law in Britain: Regulation and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 63–65 and 82.
Discussions of the Brontës and dogs to date have ignored rabies.: I. Kreilkamp, ‘Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 2005, 18: 87–110; M. B. Adams, ‘Emily Brontë and Dogs: Transformation Within the Human-Dog Bond’, Society and Animals, 2000, 8: 167–81.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003;
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Paradoxically, in the 1848–1849 cholera outbreak in Bradford dogs were suspected to be carriers of the disease. They were ordered to be confined and strays were killed. M. Sigsworth, Cholera in the West and East Ridings of Yorkshire, 1848–1892, Unpublished DPhil Thesis, Sheffield City Polytechnic, 1991.
T. L. Kemp, ‘Rabies and Hydrophobia’, Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1855, 58: 1–19.
J. Netten Radcliffe, ‘Materials towards the formation of a better knowledge of hydrophobia’, Lancet, 1855, i: 153–4 and 258–60; 1856, i: 683–5; 1856, ii: 217 and 271–3.
E. Phillips, ‘Dick, William (1793–1866)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/56035, accessed 12 Jan 2007].
W. C. L. Martin, The History of the Dog: Its Origin, Physical and Moral Characteristics, and its Principal Varieties, London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845;
H. D. Richardson, The Dog; Its Origin, Natural History and Varieties. With Directions for Its General Management, London: Wm. S. Orr & Co., 1851;
E. Mayhew, Dogs: Their Management. Being a New Plan of Treating the Animal, Based upon a Consideration of His Natural Temperament, London: George Routledge and Co., 1854.
F. Galton, ‘Heredity Talent and Character’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1865, 12: 157–66 and 318–27.
Stonehenge [John Henry Walsh], The Dog, in Health and Disease, London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1859.
G. H. Lewes, ‘Mad Dogs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 1861, 90: 222–40.
Rosemary Ashton, ‘Lewes, George Henry (1817–1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16562, accessed 16 Nov 2006].
D. Noble, ‘George Henry Lewes, George Eliot and the Physiological Society’, Journal of Physiology, 1976, 263(1): 45–54.
Quoted in J. B. West, ‘Spontaneous Combustion, Dickens, Lewes, and Lavoisier’, Physiology, 1994, 9: 276.
G. Cottesloe, Lost, Stolen or Strayed. The Story of the Battersea Dogs’ Home, London: Arthur Barker, 1971.
H. F. ‘The Home for Lost and Starving Dogs’, The Field, 1860, 16: 434.
Copyright information
© 2007 Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pemberton, N., Worboys, M. (2007). Rabies at Bay: ‘The Dog Days’, 1831–1863. In: Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589544_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589544_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35998-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58954-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)