The Rabid Wolf and the Sovereign (Bauhin 1591; Lafontaine 1668)

The prospects of a future without germs that gained traction in the 1970s did not last long. A negative futurity showed up in virulent zoonotic forms. It is showing up yet again in the form of antibiotic resistance. The Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) paradigm creates an opening insofar as it subsumes, in the words of Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris, “all human-animal coexistence […] under the sign of the ‘coming plague’, every human-animal interaction becomes a potential pandemic ground zero”—even, and against all odds, or so I argue in Vignette 13, the human–animal interactions described in the chronicle of a rabies outbreak that occurred in 1590 on the border between France and Germany.