In May 1886 a physician in Watertown, Dakota Territory, was bitten by what press reports said was a “mad dog.” The doctor immediately booked steamship passage, “gone to Paris,” the papers said, “to consult Pasteur.” Just the year previous, 1885, Louis Pasteur had announced discovery of his somewhat tortuous vaccination procedure for rabies.
A disease that was known to most people at the time as “hydrophobia,” meaning “fear of water,” a confusing term in two ways. First, the observed fear of water was a symptom, not a disease; the disease was rabies. Second, a creature afflicted with rabies did not fear water; it thirsted; but it could not drink on account of throat spasms.
The term “hydrophobia” is intriguing, too, in that it appears to be the first use of the Latin suffix “phobia” attached in usage to the specific object of fear. Nowadays we have so many fears we had to invent terms like “agoraphobia” and “pantophobia” to cover them all. Plains folk of the nineteenth century had more specific fears. It might even be said they had a phobia of hydrophobia.
In the late nineteenth century few people had the awareness or the means to run to Pasteur if they thought they had been bitten by a rabid animal. Some would have the bite cauterized, burned with an iron, in the belief that might kill the infection. Painful, at best.
Others sought out a madstone, a smooth stone, a concretion, that originated in the stomach of a deer. The finder, or someone acquiring the stone from the finder, would become a known personage who would apply it to animal bites. It would adhere to the bite, until it fell off; then be soaked in warm milk and re-applied, until it no longer stuck. I once held a historic madstone in my hands in Hutchinson, Kansas, but I know of no madstone, or any documentation of one, in North Dakota.
Nor have I found evidence of the most radical recourse, euthanasia, mercy killing, as applied to a human, in our territory. There was a celebrated, possibly legendary, case in Texas of a man tied to a tree and left to die. The classic homesteading memoir from Kansas, Sod and Stubble, includes an
episode when men of the settlement are called out to deal with a rabid boy become dangerous. When Henry, the homesteader, comes home and is asked what happened, he will only say, “Smothered in his own bed tick.”
Like that phrase, the whole experience with hydrophobia on the prairies is full of ambivalences, fertile ground for folklore, fear, and rumor. There were frequent rabies scares in particular localities, some of which became more broadly regional. Reactions were rapid—community alarms, contract tracing of a sort, killing of dogs and other animals suspected of infection.
There were voices raised against fears that seemed excessive, some even suggesting there was no such disease as rabies, it was all imagined. Newspapers on the prairies published interviews with the superintendent of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York City, denouncing “hydrophobia quacks … It’s easy to cure a disease that never existed,” he said. Newspapers in Alaska reported that indeed, the disease was unknown there. There was a gender aspect to the situation, too. The Ladies Home Journal, arguing that women especially were inclined to panic about this “bugaboo,” appealed to country editors to stop publishing local reports of hydrophobia.
The editors did not kill the news, however; I’ll be back to tell you about it.
