Halloween: Werewolves, hydrophobia and clinical lycanthropy

By Dr Gordon Bates, Historian in Residence at the RCPsych.

The nights are drawing in as we approach the end of the Celtic calendar and enter the month of Samhain. Our European forebears would celebrate this time with feasting and bonfires. The Christian church was always good at incorporating local ‘pagan’ festivals into its feast days and superimposed its own celebration of All Hallows Tide. This was the time to honour all saints and pray for recently departed souls who had yet to reach Heaven. This appears to be the origin of the supernatural links to Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) and Bonfire Night.

Over time, Western popular culture has modified these supernatural elements of Halloween to include a secular trinity of 1930s Hollywood Universal Studio horror film characters: Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman. College historian Fiona Subotsky has done an excellent job in bringing out the historical and medical relevance of Dracula (Dracula for Psychiatrists, 2019) and in this blog I will sketch out the cultural and medical significance of the werewolf or wolfman.

Image 1: Universal Studios - http://werewolf-news.com/2012/02/full-moon-features-joe-johnstons-the-wolfman-two-years-later/Werewolves. Fair use. Image 2: From collection of en:Johann Jakob Wick (1522-1588) - Werewolf Histories / Ed. by W. de Blécourt. — Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 280 p. — P. 9. — (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic). — ISBN 1137526343, ISBN 9781137526342. Public domain. 

The belief that men and women can change into animals predates even Classical sources. Cave art and pottery of the Neolithic era is full of images of hybrid man-beasts: man-lions, man-birds and man-bears (oh, my!). Man wolf hybrids are also depicted, though less commonly. Anthropologists speculate that humans representing themselves as the strong creatures that they are hunting, shows their desire to acquire that power and to become that power.

Polychrome painting of wolf in the Font-de-Gaume cavern. 1915. Drawing by Henri Breuil, published by Henry Fairfield Osborn. Public domain.

In the Classical era, historians Pliny (23-79 AD) and Herodotus (484-425 BC) record the first stories of men who could change into wolves. Even the usually credulous Herodotus says that he is not convinced by the story but the locals swear to its truth. In these cautionary tales, the wolfmen can usually transform back into humans as long as they do not lose their humanity by eating human flesh.   

This powerful parable of the importance of noble restraint with bestial power is sustained in the werewolf references found in the Chivalric romances, a literary genre popular in the medieval courts of the European monarchy. These stories followed the Norman rulers to England and the French connections can be clearly seen hundreds of years later in the Victorian resurgence of the werewolf stories which were often set in France. In Eastern European folklore, werewolves were revenants and grave robbers and closer to vampire figures which was another strand of the mythos. Like all the best monsters, the wolf-man evolves to fit the fears of the time and place.

Hydrophobia

Rabies and hydrophobia : their history, nature, causes, symptoms, and prevention / by George Fleming. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

In the Victorian era one such fear was the fear of hydrophobia. Hydrophobia was the contemporary term for rabies, a viral illness usually transmitted by an animal bite which produced bizarre neuropsychiatric symptoms before a rapid and painful death. The late stages of the disease almost defy belief: hydrophobia (fear of water), hallucinations, hypersalivation, difficulty swallowing, extreme agitation, uncontrollable violent acts and paralysis. Hydrophobia in this instance referred to the strong rejection of drinking water despite extreme thirst and saliva pooling and dribbling. The virus prevents coordinated swallowing and so drinking leads to severe choking, which is fearfully avoided.

Louis Pasteur (left) watching a colleague trephining a chloroformed rabbit during his research on rabies vaccination. Wood engraving (?), 1885. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

At the time in Britain, rabies was mostly found in the household and feral dog populations. Dog ownership rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century leading to explosion in both wild and domestic dog numbers. Deaths from rabies were first reliably recorded from 1840 and in the period up to 1902 when the disease was eradicated in the UK, there were just over a thousand deaths, a relatively small figure. However, such was the fear of terrible illness that the ‘mad dog chase’ was a regular feature of rural and urban life. Combined with rabies reputation as the worst of all possible deaths, it meant that it had a special place in the public imagination: ‘And the imagination had much to dwell upon. Victorian streets were full of dogs; many were feral, but most were family pets left to roam the streets, where packs would form and fights common. Anyone threatened by a dog had no way of knowing if it was just being aggressive or was carrying a deadly disease’ (Worboys, 2017).

 The presentation of rabies is quite variable in dogs. It was split into the commoner ‘furious’ subtype and the rarer ‘dumb rabies’. There were clear parallels with the early classification of mental illness at the time, divided between melancholia and mania. In human sufferers, the mental effects of the disease were simultaneously seen as a battle between the moral and rational aspects of the self with the contaminating madness of the rabies poison.  

The parallels between an infectious disease which causes horrific transformation, aggressive madness and death with the current myth of the werewolf in which transmission is by a contaminated bite, is readily apparent. Earlier aspects of the myth creep into the fictions and cinematic versions: the superhuman strength and hunting ability and the importance of control and maintaining humanity.

Clinical Lycanthropy

In addition to the cultural links between rabies and the popular culture figure of the werewolf, Lycanthropy is an accepted diagnosis which has a long history in psychiatry (though what it actually connotes has changed significantly). According to Robert Bayfield, a physician of Norwich, who wrote in the seventeenth century: ‘Lycanthropy [or] Wolf-madness is a disease, in which men run barking and howling about graves and fields in the night, lying hid for the most part all day, and will not be persuaded but they are Wolves, or some such beast.’ (Hunter and MacAlpine, 1963).

More recently, clinical lycanthropy has been conceived as one of several animal transformation delusions (zoanthropies) which can be part of affective psychoses, schizophrenia and delusional misidentification syndromes. Jan Blom reviewed the medical literature in 2014 and found only 13 cases in 162 years. Though accepting this was likely an underestimate, he drily concluded that ‘we should take heed not to cry wolf too often.’  

Sources

Robert Bayfield (1663) ‘A Treatise de Morborum Capitis Essentis and Prognosticis’ in Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine, 1963 Oxford University Press.

Jan, Blom (2014) ‘When doctors cry wolf: A systematic review of the literature on clinical lycanthropy’ History of Psychiatry 25 (1): 87-102.

Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, (2012) Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830-2000, Palgrave.

Michael Worboys, (2017) Mad Cows, French Foxes and Other Rabid Animals in Britain. Veterinary History. 18(4): 543–567 (p. 544).