ABSTRACT
Rabies is one of the most terrifying diseases, owing both to its disturbing symptoms and its fatal outcome. It is an ancient disease described in some of man’s earliest writings. The name rabies comes from the Latin word rabere, meaning to rave. Descriptions of rabies appear in the writings of ancient Mesopotamians (2300 BC) and Chinese (782 BC), indicating that it had already spread throughout Europe and Asia in antiquity (Rupprecht et al. 2001). In 1885 BC, the Middle Eastern city of Eshnunna required that “if a dog is mad and the authorities have informed the owner and he does not cage it, if it then bites a man and causes his death, the owner of the dog shall pay [40 shekels] of silver” (Beran 1994). The Greek philosophers Democritus, Aristotle, and Hippocrates described the disease around 400 BC. Rabies epidemics swept Europe throughout the Middle Ages (Beran 1994, Rupprecht et al. 2001, Conover 2002).
