Count Dracula Had Rabies?

A short piece in the current National Geographic magazine propounds the theory that Count Dracula (and they print a picture of…

A short piece in the current National Geographic magazine propounds the theory that Count Dracula (and they print a picture of Bela Lugosi, the original film Dracula, in evening dress, with talons poised) may not have been a vampire; he just may have had rabies. Lurid vampire legends, says the magazine, tell of male corpses leaving their coffins at night to seduce women and drink human and animal blood. A Spanish doctor, Juan Gomez-Alonzo, was struck by the similarities between the attributes of vampires and the symptoms of rabies. This included hyper-sexuality, frothing at the mouth and intense reaction to bright light. And he learned that a rabies epidemic began in rural Hungary in the 18th century and spread across Europe just as the vampire stories proliferated. He believes that peasants, frightened by the bizarre behaviour of rabies victims, created the vampire myth to explain it. Bela Lugosi was the original and best film, Dracula. A friend says his father told him that when the film was first shown, newspapers carried stories of screaming women, or women in faint, being helped out of cinemas. At which, cynics will say, "there'll always be an adman." This would be in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Then, inside the same covers, a sad reminder of the man who, in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner shot the Albatross, with terrible consequences for him and all his shipmates. "Ah, well-a-day what evil looks/Had I from old and young!/Instead of the cross, the Albatross/ About my neck was hung." But our magazine tells us that a wandering albatross met a sad end off eastern Australia, "some 5,600 miles from its home of South Georgia island near Antarctica." Some journey. It was hooked and drowned on a baited longline intended to catch tuna. Longlines, we are told, ply most oceans and in Antarctic waters set lines maybe as long as 80 miles, with thousands of hooks. An estimated 40,000 Albatrosses were hooked annually in the early 1990s. Two species are endangered and the wandering albatross is considered vulnerable. Now fishermen may be required to set their hooks at night and use extra-weights so the lines will sink quickly. And fishing boats must now fly bird-scaring streamers.

Then there's bull-riding in Texas. "Like playing a football game in eight seconds," says Sam Walker. Hanging on to 2,000 pounds of fury. "I've broken ribs, pulled my arms out and been knocked out twice, but I haven't been hurt real bad." He's 18 years old. Y