Vampires and Disease

by Daniel J. Wood

FATE :: December 2007

Of all the monsters that haunted our traditional folklore, none has so fascinated the modern mind as the vampire. Man, demon, or some combination of both, the vampire stepped to center stage in our popular culture with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, and his influence shows no sign of waning at the beginning of the 21st century. But as the image of the fictional vampire lives on, we gradually lose sight of the traditional vampire, the vampire of folklore and history, a creature more ancient and more terrible than a thousand Wallachian princes. This monster did not keep a polite distance before the kill like some aristocratic stranger; instead, he was a friend, a neighbor—even the husband who once shared your bed. He was a corpse who returned from the grave to kill.

All historical sources defined vampires as preternatural killers who drained victims of their life essence in order to perpetuate their own unnatural existence. If the vampire sucked blood to achieve this end, as many did, he normally bit his human or animal victims on the chest or thorax rather than the throat. Some throttled their victims, killing them quickly; others spread disease that decimated towns or villages over the space of weeks. Though the manner or method of destruction may have differed, the agent remained the same—a deceased human body reanimated by some devilish agency.

This diversity and unity of the malignant undead moved Dr. J. Scoffern, Professor of Chemistry and Forensic Medicine at the Aldersgate College of Medicine, to pen one of the classic definitions of the vampire. In 1870 he wrote:

“A vampire, then, is—well, what shall we say? Not a ghost, certainly; except we alter most of our existing notions of a ghost. The best definition I can give of a vampire is a living, mischievous, and murderous dead body. A living dead body! The words are wild, contradictory, incomprehensible; but so are vampires.”

Budding vampirologists will frequently encounter the assertion that the figure of the vampire only recently entered English supernaturalism. This statement would be true only if we search for the fictional image of the vampire as it emerged from Gothic literature, but the vampire of tradition lurked within Britannia’s dark corners since Anglo-Saxon times, and he attained celebrity status in the plumes of medieval chroniclers who inscribed his name upon 12th-century parchments as the cadaver sanguisugis—or “bloodsucking corpse.” As a revivified corpse, the vampire held no romantic or erotic fascination for the medieval mind; instead, they regarded these monstrous shells with disgust, and they feared that the miasma of their fetid breath would pollute the atmosphere and bring disease. The vampire was, in reality, walking death........Read the rest of this article exclusively in the December 2007 issue of FATE!