So now I know, and I kind of wish I didn’t. The book, like any good history of disease has a narrative course something like a highway with traffic accidents liberally scattered along the shoulder. You feel compelled to look, against your better judgment.

The reading experience thus swings between voyeurism and remorse, as your mental map of rabies comes more and more to resemble a fever dream, or a Hieronymus Bosch painting, and you feel that rabies must be diabolical indeed if you can be infected by the bite of a book.

That is until you come to a reminder of the mundane but profoundly comforting fact that rabies vaccinations for dogs, which have always seemed to me a bureaucratic annoyance (who gets bit by rabid dogs these days anyway?), have produced one of the historic successes in public health.

Hardly anyone in developed countries gets rabies now because dogs are routinely vaccinated.

In the rest of the world, however, 55,000 people die each year of rabies. The authors of “Rabid,” Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, a married couple who are, respectively, an editor at Wired, and a veterinarian with a degree in public health, write that most of these deaths are in Africa and Asia, a great many are children, and almost all are the result of being bitten by mad dogs.

Other animals become infected with rabies and spread it to humans, but dogs are and have always been the link. We spend $300 million a year in the United States on rabies prevention. In a pet-centric world, we may sometimes forget that the vaccinations are not primarily to protect our pets, although they do, but to protect ourselves.