I think someone mentioned recently a connection between rabies and vamirism, but I can’t find it. I read this many years ago - that there were a number of aspects of vampirism that could be explained by rabies. I have a question about one in particular
The article I read said that one effect of rabies was that the blood could no longer carry oxygen, or something along those lines (bear with me, it’s been a long time), and that the person would die from lack thereof, if nothing else killed him/her first. This same symptom would result in the blood not clotting, and the corpse would continue to look “alive” in that the face would still be reddish; and that if the corpse were cut, the blood would gush as if the person were alive, rather than what would normally happen with a corpse that was a few days old. Also, I recall that this would affect the micro-organisms that normally cause the body to decay.
So, can anyone tell me specifically what would happen if you died by de-oxygenation (assuming a lack of embalming, of course), and is this correctly something that could be caused by rabies?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m reading a book of myths and folktales. In two separate accounts of vampirism, the vampirism is “confirmed” by unearthing a recently deceased person, who bleeds as if still alive. Of interest is one account that says that a vampire had killed some oxen as well, and that a new round of vampires had eaten the oxen and thus became vampires:
(from an 1891 account relating the story of the vampires)
The book that I read this in gives the original source that each story came from. I found the original source for one of the stories in Google books. The story is here
Second full paragraph, starting with “Dr. Ennemoser”
Rabies kills by infecting the nervous system, specifically becoming fatal after it reaches the brain. The word “oxygen” appears not even once on the Wikipedia page for rabies. If rabies also destroyed the ability of the blood to carry oxygen, the recently developed Milwaukee protocol would not have even its current marginal success rate.
Which isn’t so much that the blood can’t absorb oxygen, but that the body can’t breath. So I’m still wondering if the description in the story is consistent with what would happen to a corpse that had died of respiratory insufficiency and had not been embalmed.
Not in any way at all. A person ho dies of suffocation develops a bluish tint that vanishes over the course of 12 hours or so. Aside from that the corpse is entirely unremarkable. Suffocation has no effect on blood clotting.
Interesting page. I had read about the first successful treatment, and had been wondering if there had been other survivors since. I envisioned opening a thread to ask, in fact.
So, the rabies isn’t anymore a 100% lethal disease. Good.
Yeah, the porphyria is vampirism is pretty weak - an example of taking one detail of a myth, finding a disease that would explain that one detail, then ignoring the rest of the myth (or the reality of the disease).
I like the rabies theory because it explains many different details of the myth. In fact, if you read the story I linked above, it’s pretty clear that there was a deadly and rather virulent disease that caused the events, and that vampirism was elected as the explanation.
First, it was not “the basic premise”. It was one point in a list of similarities. I brought this particular point up because of two stories I read with interesting details that I thought might have been caused by what I remembered reading in the article.
Secondly, I read the article over ten years ago, and then it was a news story based on a paper published in Neurology Journal. In looking up some of the other details I was remembering, I found some archived news articles that came from the same article. Either my memory is wrong (entirely possible) or the one article I read added some details (also possible), because the other articles don’t mention how people died at all. Free news story
I accept that death by respiratory insufficiency would not cause a corpse to retain a “lifelike appearance”, nor would the classic “stake through the heart” cause bleeding. OTOH, being presumed dead when actually comatose might just.
Are you sure that you don’t have your Universal monsters mixed up? I’ve heard rabies linked with werewolf myths (which does makes some sense), but never vampirism.
The alleged link between rabies and vampirism has been around for years too.
But neither vampire nor werewolf legends have anything to do with rabies or porphyria. Those theories have been non-starters since day one. It’s just another example of people without much real knowledge on a topic jumping to some conclusion that’s sounds like it’s grounded in science until you research it even slightly. See also ergot poisoning supposedly causing the Salem witch trials, the eruption of Krakatoa being the reason why the sky is red in Munch’s painting The Scream, “Ring Around the Rosie” being about the plague, and countless other bits of fluffy pseudointellectual nonsense.
Dr. Juan Gómez-Alonso, who wrote that piece for the journal Neurology and does not speak for the American Academy of Neurology in any official capacity, is woefully ignorant about vampire legends and how they evolved over the centuries. He tried to compare rabies to the traits of vampires in modern fiction and presupposed that those same traits were the same in historical folklore about vampires, which is not true. He also apparently highly exaggerated the symptoms of rabies in order to better fit his theory.
For example, he talked about vampires being sexual predators, and then claimed this was related to sufferers of rabies having sex multiple times a day. That’s not only not a trait of legendary vampires, that doesn’t seem to be strongly correlated to rabies either. If you go through all his alleged similarities you find similar bad conclusions.
If you want to know about the origins of folklore and legends you should consult an expert in that field, not go with what some doctor thought up after, as he himself admits, watching the movie Dracula on TV.
Zyada, if you’re just looking for people to jump on an “isn’t this a cool idea” bandwagon, you probably want to post somewhere other than GQ. Because at this point I’m getting the impression that you’re simply going to ignore any evidence that the interesting theory you remember is completely implausible.