A possibly interesting new history book on an insanity-causing disease: Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. Just published in hardcover, and as an audio-book.

Was this a disease still a threat in Lovecraft’s time? It seems so. It was a real horror, one literally stalking New England, in the early years of the 20th century. Although possibly it was a minor worry at the time, when weighed alongside things like tuberculosis and syphilis. But raving insanity was the result of the disease, which might make it interesting to Lovecraftian researchers.

   “By 1768 rabies had been distributed throughout New England.” — New Jersey municipalities: Volumes 25-26 (1948).

   “the increase of rabies of late in New England renders it obligatory on those physicians, who may meet with it, to give an account of their cases as soon as convenient” — Boston medical and surgical journal: Volume 40 (1849).

Rhode Island only had four human death from rabies between 1911 and 1917, one in Providence in 1913 (Mortality Statistics, United States Bureau of the Census 1919, p.44). However by the late 1920s the incidence of death had about doubled (possibly this was because of the swelling of the U.S. population), and there were about 100 human deaths per year from the disease in the USA.

   “In the earlier part of this [20th] century, New Jersey had a large problem with canine rabies. In 1939, the worst year for recorded cases of dog rabies, 675 dogs and four humans died of rabies.” — The History of Rabies, New Jersey Department of Health.

However there only appears to be one instance I can remember in which Lovecraft has a dog directly associated with terror, in “The Hound” (1922)…

   “The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves’ den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.” — “The Hound”.

Rabies was eradicated in Britain in 1902, and then again most famously in 1922 after a four-year outbreak caused by dogs smuggled past the quarantine in 1918. One wonders if the news in 1922 from his beloved British Isles might have set Lovecraft to thinking on threatening dogs? Although personal experience, Poe, and the 1921 movie of The Hound of the Baskervilles might seem more obvious inspirations for “The Hound”.

Forthcoming from McFarland, Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960. Due in Autumn 2012.