The Science of Monsters

There are rare instances of rabies killing people in the UK and the US. Omar Zouhri died in 2018 at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, after being bitten by a rabid cat during a vacation to Morocco. When he complained to his doctor of hand paralysis, the first rabies test came back negative. Unfortunately, by the time the doctors at Radcliffe realized it was rabies, it was too late for Mr. Zouhri. Before this, the last recorded rabies death in the UK had occurred in 2012 once again after the victim came home from a vacation, this time in Asia, where he’d been bitten by a dog. A similar tragedy happened in the United States in 2017. The Centers for Disease Control outlined the death of a sixty-five-year-old woman who vacationed in India. While there she was bitten by an aggressive puppy. Six weeks later, back at home in Virginia, the woman complained of pain and tingling in her right arm. In a few days the woman had insomnia, trouble swallowing water, and intense pain. She was diagnosed with having anxiety. Alex Berezow from the American Council of Science and Health described the deterioration of her body:

The patient’s condition worsened, and she was taken by ambulance to a different hospital. Now, she was displaying a lack of coordination, which often indicates some sort of neurological problem. Doctors had reason to believe she was suffering from a blockage in a heart blood vessel, so she underwent an emergency catheterization (i.e., doctors stuck a tube in her heart). They found nothing abnormal. By that night, the patient was agitated, combative, and gasping for air when trying to drink water. That’s when the medical team learned from her husband that she had been bitten by a dog in India.⁸

She died after many life-saving measures, including the “Milwaukee Protocol” which is an experimental treatment in which the patient is put into a coma and given ketamine, ribavirin, and amantadine. This mix of drugs were chosen to attack the inflammation in the victim’s central nervous system. Since its first use in 2004, the Milwaukee Protocol has been tried twenty-six times, being successful only once. The single person saved by this treatment, a fifteen-year-old girl, left the hospital after seventy-six days and went on to attend college.

Rabies is a rare way to die in the modern age, yet it is not unheard of. The WHO is working to eradicate rabies deaths from the globe, hoping to meet this goal by 2030. The likelihood that an American dog would suffer from rabies is slim to none, but Cujo’s aggression seems realistic in both the book and the film. And so, the palatable fear of rabies, of its ability to kill so swiftly and painfully, remains.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ARACHNOPHOBIA

Year of Release: 1990

Director: Frank Marshall

Writer: Don Jakoby, Wesley Strick

Starring: Jeff Daniels, Julian Sands

Budget: $22 million

Box Office: $53.2 million

Spiders are scary. Their spindly legs, tiny fangs, and bulbous group of eyes terrify. It’s quite nearly a fact, as they have long been derided in popular culture. For every Spider-Man there are dozens of spider-centric horror movies, think Tarantula (1955), The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), and Eight Legged Freaks (2002). According to Claire McKechnie in her study for the Journal of Victorian Culture, spiders were once observed as being associated with “ingenuity and industry”¹ but as gothic literature ascended in popularity through the late Victorian age, the spider became emblematic of the dark and mysterious. “Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused—and mitigated—anxieties about the limits of the human.” Perhaps it is this “otherness” that is at the heart of our collective fear of spiders. In a 1991 study at the City, University of London, Graham Davey concluded that it was, indeed, their distinctly non-human differences that instill fear. “It turns out that it is not so much a fear of being bitten, but rather the seemingly erratic movements of spiders, and their ‘legginess.’ Davey said animal fears may represent a functionally distinct set of adaptive responses which have been selected for during the evolutionary history of the human species.”² This makes sense, as the “erratic movements” of spiders, or other creatures, would have tipped off our ancestors to potential dangers. Whatever the reason, as we sift through research for this chapter, we feel as though spiders are scrambling up our spines!