ABSTRACT
In the 1980s David Dolphin suggested that vampires might be suffering from a real disease. He seized on one which has been debated since Alan Bennett's brilliant play The Madness of George III and argued that vampires might be suffering from porphyria. Lionel Milgrom wrote for the New Scientist in the 1970s and '80s. He attended a talk David Dolphin gave on the theory that vampires might suffer from porphyria, and the New Scientist splashed it in its Halloween issue. In 1998 in Neurology, Gomez-Alonso suggested that symptoms of rabies – such as a tendency to bite and an aversion to strong smells and mirrors – bear an uncanny resemblance to historical descriptions of vampires. He noted that the early vampire reports in the 1730s came a few years after a major rabies epidemic was recorded in Hungary.
