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A maddened creature, frothing at the mouth, lunges at an innocent victim - and with a bite, transforms its prey into another raving monster. It's a scenario that underlies our darkest tales of supernatural horror, but its power derives from a very real virus, a deadly scourge known to mankind from our earliest days. In this fascinating exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years in the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies.
The most fatal virus known to science, rabies kills nearly 100 percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. A disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans, rabies has served as a symbol of savage madness and inhuman possession throughout history. Today, its history can help shed light on the wave of emerging diseases - from AIDS to SARS to avian flu - with origins in animal populations.
From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh, fascinating, and often wildly entertaining look at one of mankind's oldest and most fearsome foes.
Bill Wasik is a senior editor at Wired magazine and was previously a senior editor at Harper's, where he wrote on culture, media, and politics. He is the editor of the anthology Submersion Journalism and has also written for Oxford American, Slate, Salon, and McSweeney's.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Free Download Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 8 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: July 19, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008MT9ZKW
Free Download Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus
Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have explored the disease in "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus."
"Diabolic," defined as a characteristic of the devil, is a good word to use. The almost always-fatal (if untreated) virus renders its victims 'hydrophobic' - terrified of water. As the victims mind devolves into a virus-ravaged insanity, whatever personality once held by the person or animal disappears, replaced by a no-doubt devilish incoherence and rage.
Every 'zombie' movie basically has rabies as the model - an untreatable disease where killing the victim even before the disease's onset is considered the humane course of action. The authors use examples of Will Smith's "I Am Legend," where his character kills his dog, his only friend, as soon as a rabies-like condition presents itself, and "Old Yeller," the frontier tragedy, which saw the title character unfairly suffer the same fate.
"Rabies" is written as a cultural history, much more than a medical journal or report. It's mostly third-person, until the end. The authors do dwell on various treatment options - and a chapter is given to Louis Pastuer's discovery of the rabies vacciene. But their primary goal is showing how this disease has factored into various cultural fears for hundreds of years.
Even without much true scientific knowledge, the doctors of the Middle Ages and before could still see the link between a 'mad' dog's bite, and the similar, fatal condition that the victim might then suffer. The terror of such a ghastly disease - with such an obvious and common cause - would clearly have made it far more horrible than an equally fatal flu or cancer, where no such link existed.
This is the second book about the history of a specific medical scourge that I have read in the past year and one half. The first was Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize winning "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" (please see my Amazon review). With "Rapid" I hoped for a second such extraordinary and wonderful ride. What came most to mind though is what Senator Lloyd Bentsen replied to Senator Dan Quayle during the 1988 vice-presidential debate: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
That's a somewhat unfair comparison though, and it's not to say that "Rabid" is not a good book, because it is. It's simply that few books can match "Emperor". "Rapid" is just exactly what its husband and wife authors William Wasik, senior editor of Wired Magazine and veterinarian Monica Murphy say it is -- "a cultural history". "Rapid" saves you doing an internet search using such search words and phrases as "Rabies", "Rabies in Popular Culture", "Rabies History", "Rabies Historical Timeline" and then exploring the many resultant links. And then it pulls all of these play-by-play results together for you, sifts and organizes and edits them, expands a bit on them in some key places, and throws in a lot of juicy color commentary along the way. From the emergence of this horrible problem of rabies at the dawn of mankind and mythology, on down to its scientific discovery and cure, and then on to current medical practice, the authors spread across their book's landscape multiple tales of madness and its often grotesque consequences including how it rears its ugly and frightening head so often in literature.
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