Rabies Timeline – Part One

Rabies has been known to humans since at least as far back as 2000 BC. Here is a history of rabies in timeline format.

1930 B.C. – The first written record of rabies appears in the Codex of Eshnunna.  The codex says that the owner of a dog showing symptoms of rabies should take precautions against being bitten. The Codex also states that if a rabid dog bites a person, the owner of the dog would be fined.

800-700 BC – Homer compares Hector to a “raging dog” in The Iliad.

420 BC – Greek philosopher Democritus documents cases of rabies in domestic animals.

400 BC – Aristotle writes: “Dogs suffer from the madness. This causes them to become irritable and all animals they bite to become diseased.”

1st Century AD – The Roman writer Cardanus writes that he believes that the saliva of rabid dogs is infectious.

1st Century AD – Physician and naturalist Celsus writes, “The Greeks call it hydrophia, a most wretched disease, in which the sick person is tormented at the same time by thirst and the fear of water, and in which there is but little hope.”

9th Century – Syrian doctors attempt to give water to patients with hydrophobia by hiding it in a glob of honey.

900 AD – A rabid bear invades the town of Lyon, France and bites 20 people.  Six of them develop the “madness” and are smothered to death by their fellow townspeople over a period of 27 days.

1026 – The first written mention of rabies in Great Britain appears in the laws of Howel the Good of Wales, in which it is indicated that a madness among dogs occurred that year.

1198 – Talmudic scholar and physician Moses Maimonides lists various “remedies against the bite of mad dogs” in his treatist, Poisons and their Antidotes.

1271 – Rabid wolves invade towns and villages in Germany, attacking domestic animals and leaving 30 people dead of of the disease.