Dr Karen Brown, an expert in Southern African veterinary and environmental history, has produced an engaging, highly readable account of rabies in the region. Like most recent, historically informed biographies of disease, it uses its subject as a lens through which to examine broader historical issues and contexts. Six recurring themes are identified: the nature of human–animal interactions; the impact of rabies on South African views of wildlife; how colonialism affected the distribution of the disease; what it reveals about concurrent social and cultural tensions; the evolution of western knowledge about rabies; the state’s role in its control. These are explored through a series of case studies that trace the different manifestations and impacts of rabies from the early nineteenth century to the present-day.
The jumping-off point for Brown’s account is Pemberton and Worboys’ history of rabies in Britain, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (London: Routledge, 2007). She identifies many similarities with Britain in scientists’ ideas about the causes of rabies, its epidemiological transmission through urban dog populations, and its control through post-exposure vaccination and the destruction, control, and eventual vaccination, of dogs. But there were also many stark differences. Unsurprisingly, rabies in South Africa had a racial and a colonial element: Africans were both the main victims of rabies and the main object of policies for its control, and their views of the disease were rarely sought or recorded. In addition, for much of the twentieth century, rabies in South Africa was not an urban dog problem, but a predominantly rural and often unreported disease that circulated and spread through domestic livestock and wildlife in addition to dogs. This made it an economic problem for farmers as well as a terrifying, deadly disease of humans, and inspired unsuccessful attempts to eradicate the main animal vectors: meerkats and jackals.
Brown’s analysis of the geography, epidemiology, understanding and response to rabies reveals her firm grasp of the science of the disease, the existing literature on colonial animal and public health, and the social, political and environmental history of Southern Africa. She skilfully interweaves insights drawn from this literature with a description of unfolding events, to reveal how the history of rabies was influenced by poverty, colonial priorities, civil unrest, racial attitudes, uneven provision of medical and veterinary services, and changing patterns of trade and land use.
While this is all highly convincing, one wishes that she could have been a little more ambitious in terms of the book’s historiographical goals. It is framed as a contribution to the history of rabies, of which little is known. But given the range of literature she draws upon to explain that history, it is a pity that she does not use her findings to speak more directly to it. A concluding section that explained how the history of rabies altered or enhanced existing historiographical understandings of the six themes it explores would have heightened the intellectual impact of this book, and potentially broadened its appeal among medical, veterinary, environmental and colonial historians. However this comment should not detract from the fact that Brown has produced a well-rounded history that explains, in an accessible and persuasive fashion, the historical manifestations of rabies in Southern Africa and why it is still a problem today.
