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For many centuries, death was a mystery, and dying a fearful force devoid of explanation. Some causes of death were deemed to be rooted in the supernatural or some sort of invading demonic force. Many who suffered from wasting diseases, anemia, tuberculosis, or cholera, for example, were misdiagnosed as the victims of vampiric attacks. After all, the symptoms fell in line with those superstitions: weight loss, coughing up blood, immense suffering. And then there were the epidemics of illness. Whole cities of people were wiped out in the bubonic plague. Outbreaks of cholera and flu decimated countries. Venereal diseases became widely feared and terrifyingly common across Europe and beyond. In the 1600s, as the plague claimed millions of lives, the cause was unknown, although we now know that the disease was carried by rats and fleas. The myth of the vampire, as a result, grew all the more foreboding. What else could claim so many lives in one fell swoop but an inhuman creature of immeasurable evil?
Content warning: Discussions of illness, death, and disease.
Media Mentioned
- The Coldest Girl in Coldtown – Holly Black
- Dracula (2006) – BBC
- Daybreakers – Lionsgate
- Nosferatu the Vampyre
Further Reading
- Polish ‘Vampires’ May Have Actually Been Cholera’s First Victims – Newsweek
- A village still in thrall to Dracula – Guardian
- The ‘secret’ source of ‘female hysteria’: the role that syphilis played in the construction of female sexuality and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Sage Journals
- TV review – Dracula (2006) – The Kim Newman Website
- Extracts from the history and medical properties of garlic – US National Library of Medicine
- The real-life diseases that spread the vampire myth – BBC.com
- Sex, Blood and (Un)Death: The Queer Vampire and HIV – Journal of Dracula Studies
- The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature – James B Twitchell
- A Disease with a Bite: Vampirism and Infection Theories in Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Xavier University of Louisiana
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