Pasteur and the Rabies Vaccine: 6 July 1885
1885 · event
On 6 July 1885 a nine year old boy from Alsace named Joseph Meister was brought to a laboratory in Paris. He had been bitten many times by a dog with rabies two days earlier, and the disease, once its symptoms appear, was invariably fatal. Louis Pasteur had been working on a treatment made from the dried spinal tissue of infected rabbits, in which the agent was weakened, and had tested it only on animals. After consulting two physicians he agreed to treat the boy with a series of injections over ten days. Meister did not develop rabies.
Pasteur was a chemist rather than a doctor, which meant he could not legally administer the treatment himself and worked alongside the physicians Grancher and Vulpian. He had already changed several fields. His work on fermentation established that microorganisms cause spoilage and disease, gave the world the gentle heating process that carries his name, and led to a vaccine against anthrax that he demonstrated publicly on a farm in 1881.
News of the boy's survival travelled quickly. Within a year hundreds of people bitten by rabid animals had travelled to Paris for treatment, some from as far as Russia and the United States. Public subscriptions from many countries paid for a research institute, which opened in 1888 and still carries his name, with a network of institutes around the world.
The case would raise questions today about consent and about testing an untried treatment on a child in an emergency, and historians have examined Pasteur's laboratory notebooks closely on exactly this point. What is not in doubt is the result. Rabies, one of the oldest and most feared diseases, became something that could be prevented after exposure, and remains one of the few illnesses where treatment given after infection reliably works.