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Subject:
From:
Verhulst <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 11 Mar 2018 22:20:48 -0400
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (134 lines)
This is uuencoded and is  (uu)decoded as per below

Tony

My name is Ray Malewitz, and I’m in the process of putting together a 
literary essay on representations of rabies in American literature.  The 
reason I’m writing is that I’m interested in finding out more info on 
the “hairball” that Jim talks to near the beginning of Huck Finn, which 
as far as I can tell is what newspapers in the 19th century called a 
bezoar or madstone.  Though Jim uses it to tell fortunes, its more 
common use at the time (again, as far as I know) was a quack method for 
treating rabies infections.  Do you have any sense of whether Twain 
wrote or alluded to this usage elsewhere in his work?  I checked out the 
facsimile of the manuscript, but unfortunately, it doesn’t include these 
relevant pages.  I’ve also tried to track how Howells’ strange fear of 
rabies might have shown up in letters to Twain, but I haven’t found 
anything on that end either.  I did find some allusions to rabies in 
Moral Sense and his story “The Grateful Poodle,” but they don’t 
reference bezoars. In archival work on Twain, has anyone out there come 
across any other references to either rabies or hairballs / bezoars 
/madstones?

Best,
Ray

Raymond Malewitz
Associate Professor and M.A. Director
School of Writing, Literature, and Film
Oregon State University
Author of The Practice of Misuse
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22814



On 3/11/2018 10:04 PM, Jerry Vorpahl wrote:
> Can someone please decode this?
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 6:52 PM Lee, Judith <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
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>>

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