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On the night of August 26, 1819, Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond and newly appointed Governor General of British North America, discovered that he could not finish his wine. Accompanied by friends, Lennox had spent the day traversing the backwoods of the Ottawa River with the goal of establishing a new township named Richmondville in his honor. When at last the party set up camp and sat down to dinner, the Duke began to feel peculiar. Shunning a glass of claret, he is said to have remarked to his friend Colonel Cockburn, "I don't know how it is, Cockburn, but I cannot relish my wine to-night as usual; and I feel that if I were a dog I should be shot as a mad one."1 By the morning of August 28, his fear of fluids had become so general he could not bathe. When it was agreed he should try to get to Montreal by canoe to seek medical attention, he could barely bring himself to approach the river's edge. Finding within himself a "desperate resolution," the Duke at last climbed into the boat, shouting, "Charles Lennox never yet was afraid of anything!"2 Almost immediately, however, the dread returned. Finding the shore near enough, Lennox jumped onto the bank and darted for the woods. When his companions caught up with him, they ushered him to a farmhouse nearby, but even the sound of the river was too much. They laid him down on a bed of straw. Within moments Charles Lennox was dead.
This essay excavates a history of phobia. Not in the sense of a patient's history, à la Freud's Little Hans or Watson's Little Albert, nor as a social construct, but rather as an epistemological formation, contingent upon discursive shifts in medical, literary, and political thought. To tell this history, a little more exposition is needed. The Governor General's tragedy became one of the most widely circulated instances of phobia in the Atlantic world in the early 1800s. As family and friends quickly discerned, Lennox had fallen prey to the notoriously deadly hydrophobia: the primary name for rabies, in medical and popular literature alike, until the late nineteenth century (Figs. 1a and 1b).
Since antiquity, rabies had been called...