Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Advance Access originally published online on September 15, 2006
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2007 62(2):141-170; doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrl016
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Legislating Fear and the Public Health in Gilded Age Massachusetts
Correspondence: * History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20894. Email: pteigen{at}nih.gov
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ABSTRACT |
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 TOP ABSTRACT LEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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Between 1876 and 1881 Massachusetts experienced an outbreak of human rabies (hydrophobia). The entire state—the Governor, the legislature, the State Board of Health, newspapers, and the citizenry and elected officials of every town and city—reacted to the disease. Central to the response was the Commonwealth's legislature—called the General Court. Through public hearings, their own debates, and the passage of legislation, it resolved widespread fear and anger, mediated conflicting concepts of disease, and promoted social solidarity in the face of an epidemic. This article first narrates the General Court's legislative actions; it then examines the conflicting understandings of disease causality; finally, it explores the social and political rituals the legislature drew upon to deal with this public health crisis. Arguing that public health legislation is simultaneously instrumental and symbolic, this article demonstrates that attention to both enriches the study of epidemics, historical and yet to come.
Key Words: public health • legislation • rabies • hydrophobia • zoönotic disease • dogs
" ‘It seemed hard that a strong, well man should have to go for a dog,’ " said Ashbel Buckland, sixty-eight, as he lay dying of human rabies in his Chicopee, Massachusetts, home. The fatalism and poignancy of his words and his brave death on 24 January 1878—widely disseminated by Bay State newspapers—touched many in the Connecticut River Valley and sparked anger and fear all the way to the State House in Boston.1
Labeled the "mad dog excitement," "the mad dog scare," "the mad dog sensation," and the "mad dog panic," in daily and weekly newspapers—and as an "epidemic" by contributors to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ)—this outbreak is interesting historically for the intense response it evoked throughout the state. Physicians and surgeons, journalists, dog fanciers, public health officials, anti-cruelty reformers, legislators, Selectmen, veterinarians, as well as men and women on the streets raised their voices in alarm. From Plymouth to Pittsfield and from Lynn to Springfield, fear of—and anger about—this dread disease aroused the citizenry to action (Figures 1 and 2).2
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Hydrophobia was known in Massachusetts long before the 1876–1881 outbreak. Near the end of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth's General Court (its bicameral legislature) passed an act "to lessen the dangerous evils of canine madness and other injuries occasioned by dogs," directed against hydrophobia.3 At about the same time, case histories of the disease began to appear, the most famous being a collection made by James Thacher (1754–1844), Observations on Hydrophobia, Produced by the Bite of a Mad dog, or Other Rabid Animals (1812).4 Then, in the 1840s, the Commonwealth began registering birth and death statistics annually.5
Before turning to those statistics, however, I should note that few other states collected public health data as early or as well as did Massachusetts. For that reason, it is hard to find localities with experience comparable to the Bay State, although rabies in wild-animal populations was probably widespread. Surveys and case reports in medical journals, however, indicate that similar outbreaks may have occurred in New York in the 1850s, Louisiana in the 1860s and 1870s, and Connecticut in the 1870s.6 The panic associated with hydrophobia and rabies, however, makes it hard for modern historians to distinguish between sporadic cases and outbreaks with multiple mortalities and major social, political, and cultural responses.
Be that as it may, Massachusetts recorded forty-four hydrophobic deaths from 1876 to 1881 (Table 1). In comparison with deaths from syphilis, diphtheria, and cholera infantum, forty-four is a small number. But it was large in comparison with the state's previous experience with hydrophobia: in the nineteen years preceding 1876, only thirteen deaths were recorded, none since 1870. The forty-four deaths occurring between 1876 and 1881 were massive in number in comparison with England and Wales, where comprehensive health statistics were also kept. During these years, when hydrophobia most troubled the British Isles, England and Wales reported 275 hydrophobic deaths, many more than in the Bay State. But when Massachusetts deaths and the English deaths are related to their respective populations, the Bay State emerges as having had a much higher mortality rate: in 1878, for example, 8.7 per million died in Massachusetts against 2 per million in England and Wales.
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A large and unexpected increase in deaths from hydrophobia was only one of the reasons the disease generated such fear in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Horrible and certain death for victims and the long collective memory of the disease and of "mad dogs" extending back to the classical period also fueled fearful individual and collective responses. Moreover, for victims and nonvictims alike, the virus, with its ability to cross the animal–human boundary, created further anxiety by undermining clear distinctions between humans and animals. Finally, the disease signaled social dislocation. Since most nineteenth-century hydrophobia was communicated by dogs, and since canines as a species were and are defined by their social relationships with humans, dogs that bit humans disrupted the sometimes pragmatic but almost always emotional human–dog relationships.7 George Fleming, an English veterinarian, wrote eloquently about hydrophobia in 1872:
And what renders the story of this malady still more sad and alarming is the fact, that it is generally derived from the most faithful and numerous of our domestic pets and servants—the dog—whose attachment to—I had almost said "veneration" for—man brings this animal at all times and everywhere to share his company, to join with him in sport, pastime, toil or hardship, and whose motto justly deserves to be semper fidelis.8
The 1876–1881 mad-dog excitement occurred just before Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) shook the kaleidoscope of practice, knowledge, belief, and feeling that characterized medical and popular reactions to the dread disease before 1885. Domesticating the virus in the laboratory, inventing a vaccine, and pressing physicians and scientists to think more of living microbes than of hypothetical poisons, Pasteur reoriented public perceptions and responses as well as medical thought and practice.9 The pre-Pasteurian outbreak under study here, then, provides an index to a cultural construct just as it was about to be replaced. With this and other pre-Pasteurian episodes in hand, historians can better understand just what Pasteur and his international disciples wrought.
Two cautions are necessary when studying pre-Pasteurian rabies and hydrophobia. For much of the nineteenth-century, medical and nonmedical writers spoke of the "virus," "the hydrophobia virus," or the "poisonous virus" as a real but unknown power. In the 1880s, Pasteur and his disciples, including Harvard University Medical School's Harold C. Ernst, destabilized the meaning of "virus" when they aggressively began to investigate its nature and power.10 Before Pasteur, a virus was called a virus because its nature and power were unknown. Robley Dunglison, for example, wrote in 1874 that the word virus "signifies poison, but which, in medicine, has a somewhat different acceptation. By it is understood a principle, unknown in its nature and inappreciable by the senses, which is the agent for the transmission of infectious diseases." To understand a Gilded Age mad-dog scare, then, modern readers must suspend their post-Pasteurian understandings of virus in favor of a deadly unseen and unknown principle.11
Because this is a pre-Pasteurian study, it retains the pre-Pasteurian vocabulary where hydrophobia refers to human rabies and rabies refers to canine rabies. This distinction was maintained consistently until the twentieth century, although never perfectly. Using the term hydrophobia until 1921, Index Medicus was one of the last places it was abandoned, well after a single virus was seen to cause both human and canine rabies. Distinguishing between hydrophobia and rabies is not merely a historical nicety. It has practical implications for those who wish to search successfully Index Medicus, the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, and its web-based version, the IndexCat.
Although the entire state reacted to the reappearance of the hydrophobic virus in 1876, this article focuses on the reaction of the Commonwealth's legislature—called the General Court. Being ultimately responsible for the Bay State's public health, senators and representatives took an active role in public health regulation that later generations would assign to appointed officials and committees. The General Court's legislative processes and deliberations, moreover, reveal the circumstances, emotions, and beliefs informing and limiting the response to the reappearance of the rabies virus. Through public hearings and their own debates, the General Court resolved widespread fear and anger, mediated conflicting concepts of disease, and promoted social solidarity in the face of epidemic disease. The first part of this article narrates the General Court's legislative actions, the second examines its mediation of conflicting understandings of disease causality, and the last explores the social and political rituals the legislature drew upon when dealing with the mad-dog sensation. This article claims that legislative actions are simultaneously instrumental—they regulate public health—and symbolic—they communicate fundamental values, beliefs, and feelings about health, disease, and death. Recognizing that the political and symbolic are as two sides of a coin enriches the study of epidemics, both historical and yet to come.12
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LEGISLATING FEAR |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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Hydrophobia reappeared in Massachusetts in 1876, with four deaths recorded in March, May, and July. The General Court, as well as journalists, physicians, and locally elected officials overlooked or ignored its ominous presence at first,13 perhaps because only five hydrophobic deaths had occurred in the preceding fifteen years, the most recent in 1870. The death of Albert Daniels in Somerville on 18 January 1877, however, triggered the collective recognition that the dreaded disease was at large in the state again.14 Early in February, senators and representatives faced a blizzard of actions about dogs, universally identified as the source of the disease. Legislators from Norfolk, Worcester, Essex, and Middlesex counties introduced five petitions, five motions, and one remonstrance calling for increased licensing fees for dogs, for leashing and/or muzzling dogs, for banning breeds susceptible to rabies, for better protection against dog bites and mad dogs, and for a change in the date licensing fees where due.15
Senate and House both referred the actions to the joint Agriculture Committee, the traditional adjudicator of dog conflict and dog-laws, which scheduled public hearings for Wednesday and Thursday, 7 and 8 March. Using the Representatives' Hall as a hearing room because the conflict interested so many citizens, the Agriculture Committee took testimony from more than twenty witnesses. Most of them spoke of the Spitz question and "the tendencies of this particular breed of canines to rabies."16 This long-haired dog with erect ears and tail curled over its back—a favorite with Gilded Age women and children (Figure 3)—played a central role in nineteenth-century debates over dog bites and hydrophobia throughout the United States. Its apparent susceptibility to rabies, many believed, derived from its ancestral tie to the wolf.17
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Making the case against the Spitz were two families who had lost daughters to hydrophobia after being bitten by Spitzes and a man who just did not like the breed. Most witnesses, however, claimed that Spitz dogs were neither more nor less susceptible to rabies than any other breed. Joseph H. Warren, a Boston physician, thought the breed was "distinguished by a nobility of mind" and no "more inclined to rabies than any other."18 Another Boston physician, Arthur H. Nichols, summarized the long chapter on hydrophobia he had just translated for Heinrich von Ziemssen's Cyclopedia of the Practice of Medicine, which asserted, among other things, that a dog's temperament did not engender rabies. Mr. Beach of Brookline testified that although his Spitz snapped at strangers, he was not ferocious. Pure-bred Spitz dogs, he added, had become valuable, ranging in price from $40 to $60 ($775–1000 in 2001). Four additional owners or breeders of Spitz said they had been bitten by their dogs frequently without having contracted hydrophobia. Finally, one witness even asserted that he would rather be bitten by a Spitz than by a horse or a man.19
Additional testimony before the Committee related to dogs and disease in general, not just to the Spitz. Thomas Cunningham of Somerville claimed that hydrophobia was a delusion: his neighbors in Somerville, the Albert Daniels, were both bitten by their pet spaniel. However, since Mr. Daniels died of hydrophobia and Mrs. Daniels did not, it proved that her husband had died from fear of the disease—not the disease itself. Mrs. Mann of Somerville proposed restraining vicious dogs without muzzling, a Mr. Riley urged making the dog tax uniform (opposing the higher license fees for females, a method of birth control), and Mr. Stearns said he opposed any additional dog legislation.20
When the hearings were over, the members of the Agriculture Committee continued to hear from constituents. "Ever since the ‘dog scare,’ " the Boston Globe wrote, "their lives have been made miserable by the appeals of the owners of Spitz dogs, who dreaded the extermination of their pets because the subject was discussed with so much ceremony in the big hall on the hill."21
After the Committee finished its work, the House and Senate tried to modify an 1867 law, "Concerning Dogs, and for the Protection of Sheep and Other Domestic Animals."22 For three weeks, the legislators tossed around a major revision before abandoning this strategy. On 4 April, Senator James J. S. Gregory of Marblehead introduced a bill to restrain or muzzle dogs, proposing, apparently, fewer changes to the 1867 law than proposed earlier. This limited effort made its way through the General Court, with much debate in the House especially. There Representative Edward I. Thomas of Brookline, opposing the killing of unrestrained or unmuzzled dogs, said he "believed that people went mad about dogs oftener than dogs go mad ... . He defended the dogs as an oppressed species; there are dogs not fit to live, but then, the speaker thought, there were also men who could be classed in this same way." Arguing the contrary, Francis W. Bird of Walpole favored a strict killing measure because "he could not see why dogs should have any more rights than hogs; they were to him vastly more dangerous and objectionable." Levi Emery, a farmer–legislator from Lawrence, on the other hand, felt there was little danger to dogs from the strictness of a new law because the police were reluctant to enforce the dog-law already in place. Francis S. Egleston, a cattleman from Westfield, "believed the present scare would subside, and then all would regret such sweeping style of legislation."23
When the stormy debates ended, the General Court enacted and Governor Alexander Rice signed, "An Act Relating to the Restraining and Muzzling of Dogs" on 27 April. Its six sections authorized cities and towns to order the muzzling or restraining of dogs and to kill noncompliant ones (after advertising the order and issuing warrants), to compensate police officers and constables for this enforcement and to punish them when failing to do it, and to issue orders to noncompliant dog owners, subjecting them to fines up to $25. The Act also ordered the State Board of Health to provide city and town clerks with a description of rabies in dogs for printing on the verso of the paper dog-licenses. It also appeared as a poster, and in the annual report of the State Board of Health.24
Noticeably missing from the Act was a provision banning ownership of Spitz or other breeds deemed susceptible to rabies. Successful lobbying by Spitz owners and the willingness of many Bay Staters to ascribe hydrophobic deaths to fear and hysteria, rather than to a poisonous virus, undermined anti-Spitz testimony.
Thus ended the General Court's 1877 work on the mad-dog panic. While the legislators were in session from January to May, six victims died. From June to December, eight more citizens died.25 Consequently, when the General Court began its 1878 session early in January, senators and representatives alike returned to the "dog question." Between 9 and 23 January, the Senate ordered the joint Agriculture Committee to consider increasing the dog tax, to devise means for more effective enforcement of dog licensing, and develop better methods of protecting sheep from canine predators. The House handled even more actions, including a bill from Pittsfield's J. N. Dunham for better protection of sheep from dogs, and a motion from Chicopee's Jarvis P. Kelly to have the Judiciary Committee—rather than the Agriculture Committee—"consider the expediency of reporting a bill to better protect human life from rabid dogs." The Judiciary Committee promptly declined to pick up this hot potato, in deference—and with relief, no doubt—to the traditional forum for dog issues, the Agriculture Committee.26 Much of the agitation came from the Connecticut River Valley, where the deaths of Ashbel Buckland at Chicopee on 24 January and Dr. L. L. Way (a dentist) in nearby Suffield, Connecticut, a day later, were both widely covered in Commonwealth newspapers.
In February 1878, the Commonwealth's citizenry increased its petitions and related actions to the General Court. Ninety citizens from Westborough petitioned for a law to reduce canine overpopulation; petitioners from Ludlow and Middlefield sought more stringent dog-laws; and fifty-two Granby residents called for "for more stringent legislation in regard to the licensing of dogs."27 Later in the month five more petitions for stricter regulation of dogs arrived at the State House. Not to be outdone by the anti-dog forces, the defenders of dogs replied with equal force. From Springfield, Edward H. Lathrop and others remonstrated against an increase in the dog-tax, as did petitioners from New Bedford, Worcester, and fifty-seven citizens from Westfield. Three other petitions defending dogs also arrived from other parts of the state.28
The Granby petition—Granby adjoins Chicopee, where Ashbel Buckland died—persuaded the Agriculture Committee to hold a public hearing on 12 February 1878. Over two hundred women and men, many accompanied by their dogs, came to the State House for "one of the liveliest committee hearings on record." Witnesses spoke passionately about their dogs, children bitten by dogs, the imaginary nature of hydrophobia, the wolfish nature of the Spitz, and the ubiquity of vagrant dogs. Statistics, sarcasm, humor, and name-calling filled the air. In the end, the dog-lovers won the day. Fifty-five of the sixty witnesses spoke against the Granby petition. The Springfield Republican glumly concluded that the "champions of the dog gloriously vindicated themselves, and the aspersed curs of the commonwealth will doubtless henceforth put on a saucier air and lose their muzzles at the first opportunity."29
In March, the House and Senate received its last petition either for or against further canine regulation. As customary, it was referred to the Agriculture Committee, whose members were under public scrutiny. "So great has the feeling become," the Pittsfield Sun reported, "that the members of the Agricultural Committee are lobbied more than all other committees combined."30 On 18 March, the Committee reported a bill to the Senate. It confirmed the 1877 Act (Chapter 167), extended damages to bitten humans that was previously extended to domestic animals such as sheep and chickens, and permitted cities and towns to create pounds to hold dogs awaiting claiming by their owners. The Boston Globe summarized the Agricultural Committee's work by saying, "They put new teeth in the dog law, to prevent that animal from putting his into some human's limbs."31
The Senate quickly agreed to the bill and sent it to the House for concurrence. The House refused, however, and returned the bill to the Agriculture Committee. A month later the Senate passed a revised bill promptly, but the House rejected it decisively, 102 to 39. Thus, in the very year the mad-dog scare recorded its greatest mortality, the General Court would not extend nor even reiterate the public health measures it had passed the year before.32 The dog fanciers and dog lovers, so visible in public hearings and effective in State House hallways, had prevailed.
When the General Court began its next session in January 1879, House members from Norton and Salem tried to revive interest again in dog regulation. The joint Agriculture Committee, however, recommended that its consideration be postponed until the next General Court, beginning in January 1880. But when the General Court met in 1880, neither branch took it up. For them the mad-dog excitement was dead and buried.33
The General Court's response to the mad-dog scare, then, was anticlimactic. Initial fear and frantic legislative action generated at the beginning of the panic in 1877 dissipated in subsequent legislative sessions and then disappeared altogether in 1880. This pattern may surprise readers expecting climaxes at the end of a narrative rather than at its beginning. Histories of laboratory research—for example, Pasteur's unveiling of a rabies vaccine in 1885 or Adelchi Negri's discovery of the Negri bodies (a practical diagnostic tool for rabies) in 1903, both accomplished after intensive laboratory work—usually end with climaxes rather than begin with them.34 Histories of epidemics, however, are often structured anticlimactically. In an essay describing "an archetypical pattern of response" to disease outbreaks, Charles E. Rosenberg concludes that "epidemics ordinarily end with a whimper, not a bang. Susceptible individuals flee, die, or recover, and incidence of the disease gradually declines. It is a flat and ambiguous yet inevitable sequence for a last act."35
Epidemics often end anticlimactically, then, but the reasons they do vary from outbreak to outbreak, depending on a specific pathogen's interaction with the social, political, and cultural circumstances surrounding its advent and recognition. Crucial to the General Court's attenuated response to the hydrophobic virus were broader socio-cultural changes in attitudes about dogs, the chief carriers of the virus. Before the Gilded Age, views of dogs as predators prevailed over views of dogs as companions and family members. During the 1870s, however, these viewpoints were reversed, and the belief that dogs were chiefly predators was subordinated to the belief that dogs were principally members of human families. The General Court did not make this revolution, but its deliberations mediated the change in an orderly fashion. This is the larger story narrated in the last section. Before getting to that, however, we need to examine the conflict over rival concepts of disease causation, which informed and inflamed public opinion and legislative deliberation.
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CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASE |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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Underlying the varied responses, strong feelings, and vociferous arguments just narrated, there was a conflict over which model of disease causation best explained hydrophobia and made the suffering it inflicted meaningful. Causal thinking about disease is universal, by no means limited to clinicians and laboratory scientists. Besides ubiquity, causality possesses "deep constitutive power," in the words of historian Stephen Kern, which determines in large part how people think, feel, and act.36 For these reasons, it is important to disentangle the varied understandings of disease at issue in legislative deliberations over the Commonwealth's public health.
Under the golden dome of the State House and across the Commonwealth, two concepts of disease vied with each other. The first held that interpersonal disruption, specifically, canine aggression towards humans, caused the disease. Supporting this model was canine overpopulation, the unrestrained ability of dogs to roam everywhere, their potential for aggressive behavior, and their varied and complex relationships with humans. In short, this particular "causal ontology" blamed suffering on an external cause—dogs.37 It was held by physicians and nonphysicians alike. Some doctors, especially those with first-hand experience with the disease, relied on a variation of this interpersonal model. They located the disease's agency in the organic, animal poison rabid dogs carried in their saliva, rather than in the dogs themselves. Although the second variation was more "scientific" than the first, that is, it was the result of experimentation, holders of both believed that the cause of hydrophobia was a specific entity external to the victim.38
Some men and women on the street and some doctors—chiefly those without first-hand experience with the disease—held a competing model of disease causation. They believed that hydrophobia was caused by a victim's hysteria, or lack of self-control, when bitten. On this presumption, death from hydrophobia came from a nonspecific, moral, internal cause: the lack of self-control when confronted by dogs, disease, or death.39 This causal ontology was introduced explicitly during the joint Agriculture Committee hearings, when Thomas Cunningham of Somerville testified to the different fates of Albert Daniels and his wife. Although both were bitten by their pet spaniel, only Albert died, thereby proving that hydrophobia was caused by fear and not by a poison communicated by the pet spaniel.40
Although not the dominant view in Massachusetts at the time, the internal cause of hydrophobic deaths was held by enough physicians and lay-people that the BMSJ and daily newspapers felt the need to challenge it explicitly. After hearing a lecture by Springfield veterinarian Charles P. Lyman on 26 December 1877, physician George S. Stebbins
remarked that he took pleasure in the fact that recently a few animals had died of the disease, as it would tend to explode the popular opinion that human victims die from effects of fright and mental anxiety, rather than from the poison itself, as it could hardly be supposed that the cattle, horses, fowls, and recently a six weeks old calf were over anxious about themselves, or lay awake night thinking about and anticipating the disease.41
Six weeks later the BMSJ editorialized against the skepticism that some members of the medical profession and the public expressed over "true" cases of hydrophobia. The editorial contrasted "the genuineness" of a case of hydrophobia with spontaneous hydrophobia. Although they both produced similar symptoms, the former were caused by a poison and the latter by hysteria. A firm line existed between the two, even though "gross appearances at autopsies" were inconclusive in "true" hydrophobia.42 A week later, the BMSJ published the complaint of a Dedham physician, J. P. Maynard, that at a recent public hearing, "an individual could have shown such ignorance of medical science as to express a doubt of the existence of any such disease."43 Again, three years later, near the end of the excitement, Reginald H. Fitz and S. L. Abbot, leading Boston pathologists and physicians, claimed to have identified characteristic lesions proving the reality of hydrophobia, "whose existence has repeatedly been denied, and in which the aetiology is somewhat obscure."44 By reiterating the words "genuineness" and "existence," these and fellow physicians insisted that discussions of causality be limited to a specific biological entity (virus, poison) that produced recognizable effects (lesions).
The strongest attack on the internal, moral aetiology of hydrophobia came in the published case reports, however. All but one of the dozen physicians who wrote about their experiences asserted, or at least assumed, that a poison caused the disease, with Melancthon Storrs in particular writing a vehement defense of the specific, external cause of hydrophobia.45 After ruling out tetanus and acute meningitis as causing the death of Victor Alvergnat (1824–1877), a Hartford French teacher, Storrs discounted acute mania also, because maniacs took liquids and hallucinated continuously while hydrophobics could not take liquids and hallucinated sporadically, by and large keeping their rational faculty. Against the skeptics, Storrs asserted that animals and young children—neither of whom had sufficient fear or imagination to bring on hydrophobic symptoms—can and do die from it. This could only happen because they suffered from a real disease, as did his patient, the French teacher. Finally, Storrs defended Alvergnat's moral standing: a courageous soldier in France as a young man and a mature Christian in Hartford, he faced his "fearful struggle" and death bravely. Those who said he died of fright cast "an unworthy reflection upon his character and memory."46
Newspapers and monthlies also debated the causal ontology of hydrophobia. In an editorial, "Death from Imagination," the Boston Globe asserted moral failings as the cause of hydrophobia and urged research into a remedy for "diseased imaginations." When reporting Alvergnat's death, it noted that "the prevalent opinion among the doctors is that the late Professor Alvergnat did not die of hydrophobia, but of inflammation of the brain, brought on by worrying and excitement."47 The monthly periodical Our Dumb Animals, published by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), printed articles, letters, and editorials asserting that hydrophobia was caused by nervous excitement and that the mass media, by amplifying fears, created more victims than did dogs.48
Not all newspapers and magazines promoted or allowed that hydrophobia was caused by fear and anxiety. In January 1878, Littell's Living Age, a weekly published in Boston, printed a digest of an article by English physician Sir Thomas Watson insisting that hydrophobia was one of the "specific contagious diseases," usually communicated by dogs.
The steady increase in the population of this kingdom implies a corresponding, though perhaps not proportional, increase in the number of its dogs. In this way the area is ever growing larger of a field ready for the reception of the poisonous germ of rabies, and for the production in due time of a more or less copious crop of hydrophobia.49
In contrast to Sir Thomas's explicit assertion of "the poisonous germ of rabies," the Massachusetts Board of Health straddled the line between those who believed the disease was caused by an external agent and those who ascribed it to moral causes. Directed by the General Court's 1877 legislation, the Board distributed on 27 April, a description of hydrophobia and rabies to city and county clerks for printing on the verso of dog licenses. Saying nothing about a germ or poison, the statement did say that humans contracted hydrophobia only by inoculation. But it qualified this suggestion of a material cause by hinting that the disease arose in dogs—or could at least be amplified in them—by immaterial, moral causes such as neglect or pampering.
No kinds of dogs, so far as is known, are specially liable to hydrophobia, except in a general way those which live under unnatural conditions of climate, food, &c. Poodle-dogs, pet dogs, and those living in heated houses, with little exercise, and fed with unsuitable food, &c., half-starved, stray dogs, and unacclimated dogs, are more likely to have hydrophobia than others.50
Conflicting, incommensurable theories of causation, then, characterized the Commonwealth's response to the mad-dog excitement. Untangling the threads of these conflicts goes a long way toward explaining the varied motives, actions, and behaviors of the Commonwealth's citizens, legislators, and physicians, narrated earlier. Paying attention to contending theories of causality—basic constituents of human identity and morality—yields much understanding about responses to epidemic disease, including their unpredictability, their contestation, and their incommensurability.
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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALS |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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At the end of the first section of this article, I noted that the General Court mediated orderly social change through its deliberations and enactments. Some—the resolution of fear, anger, and tension—were short-term, while others—redefining human–animal relations—were longer term. This section examines both types of change, focusing particularly on the decrescendo of legislation following the 1877 enactment of Chapter 167, which aimed to reduce the public-health menace of dog bites and hydrophobia.
To mediate the anxieties, fears, and tensions the rabies invasion generated in the Commonwealth, its citizenry and the General Court drew upon a traditional repertoire of social and political rituals.51 Hundreds of citizens signed the five petitions directed to members of the House. Each was prepared and submitted in a conventional form following a normative process. The aggrieved citizens first found a lawyer, or a scribe, to express their desires using acceptable wording. They then found sympathizers to sign the documents and, this being done, the organizers submitted the petition to a representative in the State House. Archaic syntax and vocabulary underscored the formality and traditional nature of the process. Petitions began, "To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in General Court Assembled," and then went on to include such traditional formulations as: "we Respectfully ask your Honorable body to cause to be enacted," or "your petitioners will ever pray, etc."52
The second ritual began when House members brought petitions to the floor. It continued when it referred them to a standing committee: in the case of dogs always the Agriculture Committee. Because this was a joint committee, the House clerk signed the jacket, attached it to the petition, and forwarded it to the Senate for concurrence. That done, the Senate clerk signed the jacket and sent the package to the Committee itself. As noted earlier, the Agriculture Committee scheduled hearings, took testimony, deliberated, and then submitted a bill to both the House and Senate. There both houses debated it extensively, gave it three readings, engrossed it, and submitted it to the governor for signature and enactment. This done, "An Act Relating to the Restraining and Muzzling of Dogs" as Chapter 167 of the Acts and Resolves of 1877 was enacted on 27 April 1877.
With one exception, the General Court had, over the course of the nineteenth century, already enacted all the provisions of the 1877 Act and codified them in Section 67 of the General Statutes (1860). Hence, the passage of Chapter 167 on 27 April 1877 was a ritual re-enactment of powers already granted to local governments and exercised more or less—usually less—by them. (The single exception was the provision ordering the State Board of Health to distribute basic information about rabies to town and city clerks for printing on the reverse of the paper dog licenses, discussed earlier.)
The General Court's rituals served several functions. First, they communicated important messages to the Commonwealth's 1.6 million inhabitants. By acting on the citizenry's petitions and testimony, the General Court declared its solidarity with the citizenry as it experienced, collectively and individually, a dangerous threat to individual and public health. At the same time, using systematic and logical procedures, the representatives and senators reassured their constituents, that they (the legislators) knew how to handle the unpredictable and fearful disease raging through the state.
Besides reassuring voters about the General Court's solidarity and competence, the legislative procedures also permitted citizens to express collective and individual feelings of disgust, fear, anger, and grief about canines, as well as positive expressions in their behalf. The formal and constrained language of the Waltham petition, for example, only partially concealed its signers' disgust and anger at dogs copulating, defecating, and accosting pedestrians on street cars, public highways, and in public buildings.53 The Agriculture Committee hearings on 7 and 8 March elicited a cacophony of anger, fear, and grief for victims mixed together with expressions of affection, commitment, and respect for the Spitz in particular and for dogs in general. Witnesses from Wenham and Chelsea grieved for daughters slain by hydrophobia and railed against the character of the Spitz. Others praised the breed's nobility, intelligence, and kindness. Amplifying the carnival-like atmosphere, one misogynist chimed in and blamed women for their dogs' "peevish" and "snappish" behavior. "A dog which was made a special pet of was apt to become snappish," he claimed.54
Legislators themselves expressed strong feelings for and against dogs during the debates in April. Senator Frederick M. Stone of Middlesex County attacked the "whole race of dogs," Senator Haydn Brown of Essex County spoke "savagely" against them, while in rebuttal Senator Ensign H. Kellogg of Pittsfield "added a good word for the dogs of Western Massachusetts, whose characteristics he thought had been grossly misrepresented ... by the honorable gentleman from Middlesex."55
The public hearings, legislative debates, and journalistic accounts thereof were largely expressive, then, easing tensions and calming emotions inside and outside the State House. The General Court's rituals, however, also worked instrumentally, that is, they accomplished something besides providing a means of individual and collective expression. By encouraging the destruction of unlicensed dogs, especially of females, for example, Chapter 167 reduced canine overpopulation in some measure. By ordering the City and County Clerks to print on dog licenses basic knowledge about recognizing rabies in dogs, the landmark enactment increased (perhaps) citizens' ability to avoid dog bites and the possible inoculation of hydrophobic poison.
Looked at in narrow focus (synchronically), rituals reaffirm the status quo; that is, they reassert established practices, values, and social relationships. This is especially so when they counter unexpected, violent, and uncontrollable natural forces, such as hurricanes, hydrophobia, and anthrax. Examined in wide focus (diachronically), legislative rituals are sometimes found to ease social and political change as well, making it more palatable by slowing its pace or attenuating its substance.56 To see how this worked in Gilded Age Massachusetts, we need to review briefly its history of dog–human relationships in the last third of the nineteenth century.
During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the Massachusetts courts, legislature, and culture generally viewed dogs as human or animal predators. Although a few dogs were workers—watchdogs and shepherding dogs—and some were family members, both of these canine identities were overshadowed by the dog-as-predator model. This view reached its highest point in the Supreme Judicial Court in a series of rulings by Justice Horace Gray (1828–1902), who maintained the eighteenth-century view that dogs were economically worthless and dangerous besides, because they never truly lost their wild-animal nature.57 In the legislature, this view culminated with the enactment of the punitive Chapter 167 of the Acts and Resolves for 1877, while in Massachusetts society it peaked during the late 1870s with mobbing, poisoning, clubbing, and shooting of dogs, sometimes legally, but often not.58
The prevailing understanding of dogs as predators ebbed in the last quarter of the century, replaced by the ideal of dogs as family members and intimate companions (Figures 3 and 4). Snapshots, portraits, pictures in books and magazines, stories about the moral or family values of dogs, and the success of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, all illustrate the revaluation of dogs.59 The proliferation of dog shows in the 1870s, the widespread interest in breeding, buying, and importing purebred dogs are further indications of a cultural change.60 By virtue of their fertility—two litters a year with two to seven pups each—their seemingly infinite variation in color, shape, size, and temperament, and the human willingness to use them in constructing individual and collective identities, dogs became paradigmatic consumer goods in Gilded Age Massachusetts.
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Turn-of-the-century economist and social critic Thorsten Veblen dwelt on dogs and their place in the emerging consumer culture in his 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Useless for work, but costly to buy and maintain, he noted, canine value resided in what the species contributed to the construction of middle class "repute"(social identity). The dog, he said, "commends himself to our favour by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a thing of good repute."61 Although Veblen stressed how the middle class differentiated itself from the laboring classes, Gilded Age dogs served all levels of society in identity construction. Working classes used dogs for self-definition by befriending strays, promoting dog fights, and fighting city hall by not paying dog taxes. By importing ancient breeds and expensive dogs from England, on the other hand, Boston Brahmins differentiated themselves from the Italian and Irish immigrants flooding into the state and working in its industries. Middle and upper classes, dominating the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, displayed their benevolent and reformist credentials through their ardent support of anti-vivisectionism and of dogs as family.62
On an individual level, Boston's Albert Watts (1846–1925) exemplified Veblen's understanding of how the leisured (middle) class used dogs. An immigrant who grew up in the Boston slums, Watts raised himself into the Hub's middle class by importing, selling, healing, and showing dogs during the 1870s.63 Social and economic capital from these endeavors permitted large investments in residential and commercial real estate and his entrance into Boston's political, theatrical, and sporting (horse racing and boxing) circles. For the last thirty years of his life, he thrived as a member of the leisured class, living in the then new and fashionable Copley Square Hotel, dressing in fine clothes, and collecting sculpture, paintings, textiles, and Radio Corporation of America stock. A shrewd entrepreneur and showman, Watts recognized implicitly in the 1870s what Veblen said explicitly in 1899: dogs were a mark of, and avenue into, the leisured class.64
Demographic changes supported or at least paralleled the canine revaluation exemplified by Albert Watts and the influence of the MSPCA. Between 1850 and 1880, the Commonwealth's population grew by 79% to 1.8 million. Acknowledging the symbiotic relationship of dogs and humans, a knowledgeable Englishman, quoted in a Boston magazine, noted in 1877, "the steady increase in the population ... implies a corresponding, though perhaps not proportional, increase in the number of its dogs."65 Increasing income as well encouraged the production of more dogs. With more wealth—the value of per capita assessed personal property in Massachusetts grew by 31% between 1850 and 1880—men and women could buy and maintain not only more dogs but more expensive ones also.66
Family structure and size changed in the nineteenth century as well. Between 1840 and 1880 the crude birth rate in the United States declined by 23%, from fifty-two to forty live births per thousand population. During the same decades, children per thousand New England women aged twenty to forty-four declined by 34%, from 752 to 498. Besides these general changes, Massachusetts experienced growth in the number of women who never married.67 Between 1830 and 1880, they grew by 28%, from 12,900 to 17,800. Demographic changes such as these outline major changes in social and intimate relationships. Although quantitative data about change in the canine population do not exist for correlation with changes in the human population, data on the latter reveal ample opportunities for dogs to further enmesh themselves socially and emotionally with humans.
The legislative rituals of 1877–1880 facilitated changes in the social relationships between dogs and humans and attenuated the fear and anger that accompanied the reappearance of hydrophobia in the Commonwealth. The enactment of Chapter 167 in 1877 Acts and Resolves preserved the old view of dogs as predators. But when dog antagonists tried to reiterate and extend that legislation during the 1878 session, they were unsuccessful. Although they persuaded senators to support additional public health legislation, they failed to convince the 1878 House. Trying again in 1879, the dog regulators got as far as the Agriculture Committee but no further. Finally, in 1880, they gave up their crusade entirely. During the rest of century, when the General Court passed dog legislation, almost all of it was aimed at protecting dogs from humans, not humans from dogs.
Following the lead of the General Court, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) also changed its understanding of the nature and value of dogs soon. In 1868, the Justices had ruled that dogs, unlike horses and cows, had no intrinsic value and were, therefore, "entitled to less legal regard and protection than more harmless and useful domestic animals." But after the legislature changed its mind during its 1878–1880 deliberations, the SJC changed its views as well. In 1882, it ruled "that dogs are now a valuable species of property; that their education or training is now carried so far, that they are no longer to be regarded in the same light as formerly; that they often are not only of much pecuniary value, but are objects of special affection."68
The General Court's response to the mad-dog panic, in short, was a simple two-step. The first, taken between February and April of 1877, was primarily expressive: legislators and citizenry publicly displayed their fear and anger as the former assured the latter that the danger was manageable within the Commonwealth's social and political system. This quick-step was followed by a slower one, extending from January 1878 to and beyond the 1881 end of the outbreak. The legislature disengaged from the dog-as-predator model during this time and adopted a more neutral attitude towards dogs and their owners, and sometimes even a friendly one. This hands-off-my-dog attitude continued well into the twentieth century. Only in 1969 did the General Court mandate the vaccination of dogs and cats against rabies, long after public health officials elsewhere had shown that vaccinated dogs and cats were an effective barrier against rabies endemic to such wild-animal populations as skunks, raccoons, and foxes.69
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CONCLUSION |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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Rituals of public health regulation are doubly complex. In one dimension, they operate symbolically and instrumentally. In another, they work in the short run to reinforce traditional values and practices, but can serve in the long run to mediate cultural change. It is this complexity that makes public health regulation so valuable for historical research. "It is not too much to say," writes anthropologist Mary Douglas, "that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then finds words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts." Recognition and recapture of the dual nature of public health action aids our understanding of how bodies-politic reacted to epidemics in the past—and how they might respond in the future.70
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EPILOGUE |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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In providing this account of the Commonwealth's mad-dog sensation, I have drawn upon varied sources: news and editorials from the daily and weekly press; editorials, letters-to-the-editor, and case reports in the medical press; legislative journals and archives; law reports; State Board of Health minutes and reports; and images, both mass produced and unique. This incomplete list indicates the complexity of this historical epidemic and is a reminder that historical epidemics are not merely medical, social, or cultural phenomena, but all of them seamlessly enmeshed together.
To account for this complexity, I adopted a pluralist historiography, examining the General Court's action in three ways.71 Legislating Fear, the first section of the article, was a narrative providing a temporal account of General Court's public health legislation. Next, Conflicting Concepts of Disease examined competing ideas of causality as antagonists in the legislative narrative. Finally, Social and Political Rituals contributed a theoretical understanding of the General Court's work by bringing it under a theory of symbolic action. The challenge of my account of the Bay State's mad-dog panic rests, I should say, as much in the coherency and complexity of its historiography as in its correspondence to the traces the epidemic left behind.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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Members of the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine Division Brown-Bag Luncheon read and commented upon an earlier version of this article, as did Susan D. Jones of the University of Minnesota. Marlene Teigen contributed research assistance in old newspaper files.
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NOTES |
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TOPABSTRACTLEGISLATING FEARCONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF DISEASESOCIAL AND POLITICAL RITUALSCONCLUSIONEPILOGUENOTES |
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1 Worcester Spy, 24, 25 January 1878; Springfield Republican, 24 and 25 January 1878; and Boston Globe, 25 January 1878.
2 The response of the Commonwealth's medical profession equaled or exceeded that of the journalists and politicians. Between 1876 and 1881, physicians and surgeons produced more than thirty case reports, articles, news reports, and editorials about hydrophobia, most of them in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ). Even English neurologist William R. Gowers (1845–1915) joined in. The fourteen case reports generated during the mad-dog sensation are the subject of a separate essay.
3 "1797—Chapter 53," in Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1890–98), IX, 420. Dated 19 February 1798, the Act reaffirmed colonial-era regulations.
4 On Thacher, see J. Worth Estes in Dictionary of American Medical Biography, ed. Martin Kaufman, Stuart Galishoff, and Todd L. Savitt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), II, 735–36. Estes erroneously characterizes Thacher's work on hydrophobia as minor. In fact, it inaugurated a series of systematic reports on the disease (listed below in note 5) that continued through much of the century.
5 On registration in Massachusetts, see James H. Cassedy, American Medicine and Statistical Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 194–98, and Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 8–36.
6 Thomas W. Blatchford and A. D. Spoor, "Report on Hydrophobia," Tr. Am. Med. Assoc., 1856, 9, 235–336; J. Lewis Smith, "Report of a Case of Hydrophobia; With Statistical Observations," N. Y. J. Med., 1855, 15, 233-45; T. G. Richardson, "Report on Hydrophobia," Proc. Louisiana Med. Assoc., 1880, 3, 49–65; and Connecticut State Board of Health, Registration Reports, 1848–81.
7 With twenty-first-century knowledge of rabies, we can guess that environmental dislocations, permitting the rabies virus to spill over from undomesticated animal populations into domestic ones, preceded the social dislocations. During the mad-dog scare, Massachusetts officials and the public alike were well aware that skunks, foxes, and raccoons as well as dogs, cats, and other mammals could become rabid. (This information was printed on the verso of dog licenses beginning in 1877.) However, the relationship between domestic animals, wild animals, and their environments went unstudied, or at least unexpressed, until later in the century.
8 George Fleming, Rabies and Hydrophobia: Their History, Nature, Causes, Symptoms, and Prevention (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), [1].
9 Most historical interest in rabies has focused on Pasteur's work and the subsequent identification of the rabies virus. These subjects are succinctly summarized by K. David Patterson, "Rabies," in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 962–67; James H. Steele and Peter J. Fernandez, "History of Rabies and Global Aspects," in The Natural History of Rabies, ed. George M. Baer, 2nd ed. (Boston: CRC Press, 1991), 1–23; Rabies, ed. Alan C. Jackson and William H. Wunner (New York: Academic Press, 2002); and Jean Théodoridès, Histoire de la Rage: Cave Canem (Paris: Masson, 1986). Major interpretive works include: Gerald L. Geisen, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; French edition, 1994); Lise Wilkinson, Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); A. P. Waterson and Lise Wilkinson, An Introduction to the History of Virology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); and Sally Smith Hughes, The Virus: A History of the Concept (New York: Science History Publications, 1977).
Scholars examining cultural responses to the disease include: Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 167–202; Bert Hansen, "America's First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress," Am. Hist. Rev., 1998, 103, 373–418; Kathleen Kete, "La Rage and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies In the French Nineteenth Century," Representations, 1988, 22, 89–107; Robert Haas, "Might Zora Neale Hurston's Janie Woods be Dying of Rabies? Considerations from Historical Medicine," Lit. Med., 2000, 19, 205–28; and John D. Blaisdell, "With Certain Reservations: The American Veterinary Community's Reception of Pasteur's Work on Rabies," Agric. Hist., 1996, 70, 503–24.
10 Harold C. Ernst, "An Experimental Research upon Rabies," Am. J. Med. Sci., 1887, 93, 321–41. On Ernst (1856–1922), see John Harley Warner in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), VII, 559–61.
11 Robley Dunglison and Richard J. Dunglison, A Dictionary of Medical Science (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1874), 1106. The best window into pre-Pasteurian thinking about hydrophobia and rabies is Otto Bollinger's essay, "Die Wuthkrankheit," in Handbuch der chronischen Infectionskrankheiten, ed. Christian Baeumler, Arnold Heller, and Otto Bollinger (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1874), 503–73. This constitutes volume 3 of Handbuch der speciellen Pathologie und Therapie, ed. Hugo von Ziemssen (1874–83). For Boston physician Arthur H. Nichol's English translation see note 16 below. Contemporaneous with Nichol's 1875 translation is the valuable but less known essay by Charles P. Russel, "Hydrophobia in Dogs and Other Animals," New York Department of Health, Annual Report for 1874–75 (1876), 717–63.
12 Many of the ideas used here are drawn from Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
13 Massachusetts, Commonwealth Secretary, Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths for 1876 (Boston, 1877), lxxix; and ibid. for 1887, cx–cxi.
14 Sanford Hanscom, "A Case of Hydrophobia," BMSJ, 1877, 96, 458–61; Springfield Republican, 19 January 1877; and Boston Globe, 20 January 1877.
15 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1877 (Boston: Massachusetts General Court, 1877), and "Legislative Package for Chapter 167 of 1877 Acts and Resolves," Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Massachusetts.
16 Boston Globe, 8 March 1877.
17 The nineteenth-century American Spitz no longer exists, although it may be an ancestor to some modern breeds, such as the Pomeranian. (See Walter Hutchinson, Hutchinson's Dog Encyclopaedia [London: Hutchinson & Company, 1935?], 1753–60.) Dog breeds are plastic, subject to continuous reconfiguration and redefinition over time; their names, however, remaining relatively stable. The historical bifurcation of referent and sign has led to unnecessary quarrels over the identity of specific dogs.
18 Boston Globe, 8 March 1877.
19 Otto Bollinger, "Hydrophobia," trans. Arthur H. Nichols, in Cyclopedia of the Practice of Medicine, ed. Hugo von Ziemssen (German edition) and A. H. Buck (English edition) (New York: William Wood & Co., 1875), III, 431–512; Boston Globe, 8 and 9 March 1877; and Boston Journal, 7, 8, and 9 March 1877.
20 Boston Globe, 8 and 9 March 1877; Boston Journal, 7, 8, and 9 March 1877.
21 Boston Globe, 5 April 1877.
22 Massachusetts, General Court, Acts and Resolves for 1867 (Boston, 1867), chapter 130.
23 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1877, 150–440, and Senate Journal for 1877, 98–320; Boston Globe, 5, 6, 24, and 25 April 1877.
24 Massachusetts, General Court, Acts and Resolves for 1877 (Boston, 1877), chapter 167, and Massachusetts State Board of Health, Annual Report for 1877 (1878), xxviii–xxx.
25 Massachusetts, Commonwealth Secretary, Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, 1877 (Boston, 1878), lxxix.
26 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1878, 33–461, and Senate Journal for 1878, 26–366.
27 Massachusetts, General Court, Senate Journal for 1878, 68.
28 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1878, 101, 133, 143, 148, 200.
29 Springfield Republican and Boston Globe, 13 February 1878.
30 Pittsfield Sun, 6 March 1878.
31 Worcester Spy, 19 March 1878; Boston Globe, 19 March 1878; and Massachusetts, General Court, Senate Document 124 (18 March 1878).
32 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1878, 33–461, and Senate Journal for 1878, 26–366.
33 Massachusetts, General Court, House Journal for 1879, 149–363, and Senate Journal for 1879, 103–259.
34 Gerald L. Geison, "Louis Pasteur," in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), X, 400–6, and Bruno Zanobio, "Adelchi Negri," ibid., 15–16.
35 Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 293, 286.
36 S. Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.
37 Richard A. Shweder et al., "The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering," in Morality and Health, ed. Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 119–69; Owsei Temkin, "The Scientific Approach to Disease: Specific Entity and Individual Sickness," in Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. A. C. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963), 629–58; and Charles E. Rosenberg, "What is Disease? In Memory of Owsei Temkin," Bull. Hist. Med., 2003, 77, 491–505.
38 A. P. Waterston and L. Wilkinson, An Introduction to the History of Virology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 54.
39 Shweder et al., "The Big Three of Morality," 122–23. See note 37 above.
40 Boston Globe and Boston Journal, 8 March 1877.
41 "Rabies and Hydrophobia (Proceedings of the Springfield Society for Medical Improvement)," Boston Med. Surg. J., 1878, 98, 82.
42 "Dogs and Hydrophobia," Boston Med. Surg. J., 1878, 98, 216.
43 Claudius M. Jones, "A Case of Hydrophobia," BMSJ, 1878, 98, 236; and Robley Dunglison, Dictionary of Medical Science (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1874), 517, 829.
44 Samuel L. Abbot and Reginald H. Fitz, "A Case of Hydrophobia of Doubtful Origin," Boston Med. Surg. J., 1881, 104, 150.
45 Charles E. Banks (1854–1931) was the exception (Boston Med. Surg. J., 1879, 100, 288–92).
46 Melancthon Storrs, "An Interesting Case of Hydrophobia and a Question of Diagnosis," Med. Record, 1877, 12, 418–21.
47 Boston Globe, 11 April and 5 June 1877.
48 Our Dumb Animals, 1877, 9, 80, 85, and 100.
49 Thomas Watson, "Hydrophobia and Rabies," Littell's Living Age, 1878, 21, 220–31; and Popular Science Monthly Supplement, 1878, 2, 218–31. Physician to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, as well as the author of the classic Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, Watson was one of the most respected medical authorities in Great Britain and the United States. (Norman Moore and Anita McConnell, "Sir Thomas Watson," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], LVII, 674–75.)
50 The Board's statement also appeared on handbills, posters, and in the Board's Annual Report for 1877 (xxvii–xxx), besides being issued on dog license papers. Although the Board hesitated to ascribe hydrophobia to a specific poison or germ, its minutes for 16 May 1877 and 11 October 1878 show germ theory on their agenda ("Massachusetts State Board of Health Minutes, 1869–1914," Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Massachusetts).
51 R. A. Joyce, "Ritual and Symbolism, Archaeology," in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), XX, 13371; "Ritual," Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1987); Elizabeth S. Evans, "Ritual," in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), III, 1120–23; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1996); and Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man, 1974.
52 "Legislative package for Chapter 167 of the 1877 Acts and Resolves," Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Massachusetts.
54 Boston Journal, 7, 8, and 9 March 1877.
55 Boston Globe, 6 April 1877; Pittsfield Sun, 7 March 1877.
56 Jon P. Mitchell, "Ritual," in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1996), 490–93; Elizabeth S. Evans, "Ritual," in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 1120–23; and John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, "History, Structure, and Ritual," Ann. Rev. Anthropol., 1990, 19, 119–50.
57 Blair v. Forehand, 100 Massachusetts Reports 136 (1868), and Cozzens v. Nason, 109 Massachusetts Reports 275 (1872).
58 Boston Globe, 15 February 1877; Massachusetts Weekly Spy, 3 March 1877; Pittsfield Sun, 3 April 1877; and Springfield Republican, 4 June 1877.
59 Daily and weekly papers often included stories about the family value of dogs. Our Dumb Animals (published by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) was filled with such stories and images about dogs as intimate family members. On the place and influence of this Massachusetts reform movement, see Bernard O. Unti, "The Quality of Mercy: Organized Animal Protection in the United States, 1866–1930" (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2002, 185–226).
60 Gilded Age newspapers, especially New York ones, published extensive coverage of dog shows. New York's Westminster Kennel Club's annual show (first held in 1877) was the richest, largest, and most durable in the United States, but by no means the only one. Charles Hallock's Dog Fanciers Directory and Medical Guide (New York: Orange Judd, 1880) provides a list of dog shows in the United States in the 1870s. This slim volume also describes of how extensive dog breeding, showing, and selling had become after the Civil War.
61 Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 141.
62 Bernard O. Unti, "The Quality of Mercy." See note 59 above.
63 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes nicknamed Boston the "Hub of the solar system." It became "Hub of the universe" in the twentieth century. See Thomas H. O'Connor, Boston A to Z (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 169.
64 Watt's estate was probated at $91,000 in 1925, about $910,000 in 2001 dollars. This brief account of the Boston dogman is based on research in newspapers and city, state, and federal archives in preparation for a biography.
65 Watson, "Hydrophobia and Rabies," 220. See note 49 above.
66 United States Bureau of the Census, Compendium to the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses.
67 United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (1975), I, 54, 49; and P. Uhlenberg, "A Study of Cohort Life Cycles: Cohorts of Native Born Massachusetts Women, 1830–1920," Popul. Stud., 1969, 23, 41 (the figure for 1880 is estimated).
68 Blair v. Forehand, 136–45, see note 57 above; Morewood v. Wakefield, 133 Massachusetts Reports 240–2 (1882).
69 Massachusetts, General Court, Acts and Resolves for 1969, Chapter 207.
70 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: Analysis of Concept[s] of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2004, 1966), 77–78.
71 This historiography is indebted in part to Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Glob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), especially "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," 182–203.
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