Rabies was one of the most feared diseases in the European imagination. A virus that is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, it causes throat muscles to constrict, prevents swallowing, gives a sensation of choking, and causes hydrophobia, an extreme fear of water often accompanied by frothing and drooling. Victims become wild and aggressive like the domestic dogs or wild animals that act as vectors of the disease, leading to a dehumanizing and painful death. Although in the modern world domestic animals and sometimes wildlife can be vaccinated against rabies, and post-exposure vaccines are available for people bitten by rabid animals, Karen Brown explains in Mad Dogs and Meerkats that rabies is a disease on the rise in South Africa, most often affecting Africans, especially children, living in rural areas and urban townships where inadequate health care and poverty prevent treatment in time to save lives. While total mortality levels from rabies are not high, the disease is of interest as a reflection of the inability of the modern state to provide adequate health care to all of its citizens, and as an index of mistrust of government interventions among people neglected or victimized by the state.

This history of rabies in South Africa locates the virus mainly as a modern disease that accompanied white settlement in the nineteenth century. In particular, a British middle-class culture of leisure and sport facilitated the spread of rabies through pedigree dogs brought to the Cape in the late nineteenth century, causing the first recorded mass outbreak of the disease in Port Elizabeth in 1893. Because of a long incubation period of many months, infected animals on ships were able to spread rabies with no apparent symptoms. The disease was feared enough that Europeans with money traveled to France to obtain inoculations after Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine in the 1880s, at a time when germ theory was in its infancy and debates about disease causation still raged. As in Britain, outbreaks of rabies in South Africa exposed tensions of race and class, with middle-class dog owners often blaming the dogs of African working classes and rural dwellers for spreading the disease. State methods of combating rabies through dog quarantines, tie-up laws, mandatory muzzling, and mass culling of strays often succeeded in stanching the disease, even as pre-exposure vaccines became available after the 1920s.

The emergence of a wildlife conservation movement from the late nineteenth century, most often associated with the gradual development of Kruger National Park, created havens for wildlife that were actual or potential reservoirs of the rabies virus. This elicited concern among veterinarians, as well as white and black farmers, who feared the loss of sheep, poultry, and cattle by wild canids such as jackals. In South Africa the yellow mongoose was the most significant wildlife vector of an indigenous strain of rabies that made otherwise docile animals into far-ranging and aggressive predators infecting domestic animals and people alike. Mass extermination campaigns (which included gassing of underground warrens over thousands of hectares of land) failed to stanch rabies in mongooses, even as they created an outcry among conservationists and some health officials who argued that destroying mongooses would affect the ecology adversely and lead to the proliferation of rodents carrying the even more deadly bubonic plague. For white and black farmers, rabies in jackals was the bigger threat, causing these wild canids to range much further afield than normal, destroying millions of head of sheep.

Throughout this book, Brown explains that outbreaks of rabies paralleled key historical trajectories familiar in southern African history. These include the development of a southern African system of labor migration and African reserves associated with the rise of diamond and gold mining; the expansion of a commercial sheep and cattle frontier dominated by white settlers; the breakdown of rural social services in the late twentieth century under apartheid Bantustan policy; and the wars of independence in southern Africa that brought refugees across borders, often accompanied by dogs that acted as rabies vectors, infecting new environments, such as squalid urban townships. In the last years of apartheid, internal civil war in KwaZulu-Natal created a breeding ground for rabies whose legacy persists today.

Brown weaves her history of rabies in South Africa with current themes of interest to historians of the environment and science and technology studies. For her, rabies is an agent that takes advantage of changing environmental and economic circumstances by modifying the behavior of animal hosts in order to propagate itself. This is very much a history of the development of veterinary services in South Africa, associated with the founding of the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute near Pretoria in 1908 that empowered the South African state to combat myriad diseases of wildlife and domestic animals. Yet it is also clear that the science of combating rabies was an international endeavor, reliant on vaccines developed in the twentieth century outside of South Africa, especially in France, the United States, and Japan.

The major omission in Mad Dogs and Meerkats is Brown's admitted inability to elicit many African perceptions on the history of rabies in their own communities. As a result she cannot say whether or how indigenous therapeutics responded to a disease whose origins may very well have been in Africa. Brown's most interesting attempt in this regard is a brief discussion from southern Angola, where Africans identified a disease that they called engüengo, meaning ‘madness of man and dogs’, a sorcery that passed animal characteristics to humans. Brown calls for future studies that investigate reservoirs of rabies from north of the Zambezi River to fill this gap in our understanding of rabies in Africa.