A PRAYER TO ARISTAIOS
Thousands of years ago, in a place of
rocks and sea and cerulean skies, men and women gazed with terror upon the face
of evil: wolves and dogs and men seemingly made mad by the gods. The Greeks
called on Artemis, beseeching her to intervene against the illness known as
rabies as she was said to do. But Artemis always had better things to do than
listen to their pleas – not a single biting, shrieking, drooling victim lived
to tell of her power in all the long centuries of pleas. And their true foe, a
microscopic machine which exists only to make more copies of itself, worked
unseen and uncomprehended until one man deduced a means to fend off this
hideous destroyer of the mind.
We reap the benefits of Louis Pasteur’s
work even now. This French scientist brought us not only vaccines to prevent
rabies infection outright, but developed post-exposure prophylaxis, and all
without ever seeing his enemy. The ancient Greeks had another god, one who
guarded against the onset of the spreading madness: Aristaios; and they might
consider Pasteur to be his specially favored son.
Rather than blaming this disease on
angry gods, in recent centuries man has rewritten the myth in various literary
horror themes. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, alien invaders – on cursory
inspection these are stories with Freudian or Victorian themes, or merely
moneymaking fantasies which owe their proliferation to the availability of
cheap pulp paper for dime store novels, and later on the blossoming film
industry. But they all derive from a single fear unique to humans: the utter
obliteration of self, transmissible to others.
As a lifelong fan of the horror genre, I
find the zombie myth to come the closest to the reality of rabies. This has
perhaps been aided by my up close and personal encounter with this ancient
scourge fairly early in my career. A cat - every muscle finely trembling - grasping
blindly at the air just beyond its carrier door – pupils dilated as in death –
a single drop of saliva poised on lower lip. It had ceased to be a cat and been
instead transformed into an automaton with only one purpose: that of
transforming all other living creatures within reach into identical violent
automatons. Given the opportunity it would have shredded everyone in the exam
room into ragged, bloody walking dead.
My immediate and visceral reaction upon
seeing this poor doomed creature felt more like instinct than objective medical
evaluation. I knew that I was in the presence of Death. It may be that we as a
species have lived and evolved in proximity to this particular lyssavirus for
millions of years and in so doing can recognize and fear its handiwork almost
as readily as we do the hissing of snakes.
One would expect that the prospect of
such a terrible disease would cause veterinarians everywhere to rise up as one
and shout from the rooftops about the need to immunize our domestic house pets
against rabies even today. Certainly many have done so, and we can attribute
the vanishing of canine rabies from the United States to successful public
health campaigns involving private practice veterinarians. But here in Southern
California I find myself and many of my colleagues doing battle against an
uninformed public and veterinarians who apparently consider rabies, common in
our local bat population, as mythical a threat these days as the aforementioned
zombie and friends. It is more common for a new client to tell me that their prior
veterinarian specifically told them to avoid rabies vaccination than for them
to be able to tell me their cat has even once received it.
So we who recognize the danger soldier
on – we, who serve as priestesses and priests of Aristaios. We perform the rituals
of unwrapping syringes and mixing diluent into lyophilized powders and
injecting them into our willing supplicants, and all that is lacking in our
endeavors are incense and chanting and long linen robes. With each injection we
offer up a silent prayer that our nostrums do their magic, and that the evil be
kept at bay for another year, and another, and yet another. And we teach – or
at least we try. We are the new Greeks.
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Apologies for the double spacing. I can't seem to fix it.
