Mad Dogs and Meerkats

Karen Brown is currently an ESRC Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. She has published a number of papers that deal with environmental and veterinary history in South Africa.

"Brown has done a brilliant piece of detective work to trace the erratic progress of the disease through the region in the twentieth century. She integrates an innovative history of science and medicine with a complex understanding of the ecology of disease. All of this is told in an engaging narrative which captures the cultural and political significance of rabies in societies riven by divisions of class and race." "A compelling history of one of the most gruesome epidemic diseases that affect both humans and animals…. In seven chapters Brown is not only writing a history of rabies in colonial and post-colonial Southern Africa but shows how medical history can be as much environmental history as it is the history of ideas and of course social history." (Environment and History) "Karen Brown demonstrates in her well-researched survey that the history of rabies in South Africa involved not only tranformations in veterinary practices, in epidemiology, in conservation, and in public health policy but also in wildlife. Over the twentieth century, the disease adapted to a variety of faunal vectors, including jackals, tigers, lions, mongooses, meerkats, and wild, stray, and domestic dogs." (ISIS) "With few full studies of rabies available, Brown's ecohistorical perspective will generate more than parochial interest." (Choice) "No matter whether one's chief interest lies in the human or animal component of her tale, Dr. Brown gives much food for thought in her revelation of human-animal interactions and how infections pass between animals and people.…In addition to the lively and informed nature of Dr. Brown's writing, Mad Dogs and Meerkats is also readily accessible to the layperson. Dr. Brown includes many quotations from writers and experts in the field, always ensuring that such quotations are pertinent and salient, while restricting them to the most relevant utterances made by these professionals." (New York Journal of Books)