A person who was infected with tuberculosis was very contagious and usually spread it to his relatives or neighbors. However, not much was known about the disease in those times. Due to the unknown parameters of the disease that weren’t yet discovered and the doctors’ inabilities to successfully treat the disease, many people started to attribute the spread of tuberculosis to vampirism. Although tuberculosis was the most common disease linked to vampirism, there were others such as porphyria, rabies, syphilis, and AIDS. In the last section, I discussed Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its different metaphorical depictions of the vampire. The metaphorical depictions include comparing Count Dracula and vampirism to human evil, disease, as well as an anti-Semite’s view of the Jew during the 19th century. Additionally, I discussed how Dracula has impacted the contemporary view of the vampire. For instance, many of the Count’s qualities are adapted by the fictional modern vampire. Such characteristics of Dracula include: Dracula’s need to travel with boxes filled with his native soil, his …show more content…
I believe we’re attracted to vampires mainly because of our increasing fear of death. Vampirism offers us a way of living past our death and essentially become immortal. Who wouldn’t want that? The conclusion that I reached by the end of this project is that contemporary fictional vampires are very different from the vampires of folklore. This is partly due to advancements in science and medicine as there was a connection between vampires and diseases back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Symptoms of diseases were similar to that of vampires, so many people confused up the two since they did not know much about diseases back then. However, as the germ theory was discovered and more scientific advancements were, the fear of vampires of folklore came to a halt. Additionally, I conclude that the modern fictional vampire is based on the Count Dracula vampire character created by Dracula as they share many similarities.
I was surprised to hear that as a part of old-folk rituals, due to the fear of vampirism and to prevent future vampire attacks, people actually exhumed the bodies of the deceased, and checked to see if the corpse had become a vampire. If the corpse had fresh, circulating blood coming out of the body and was not decomposing, they believed the corpse became a vampire. As a result,