1885 · Attenuated Rabies Vaccine · Work 1042 of 1,871
A chemistry laboratory in Paris on a summer evening, a brass petroleum lamp on a long oak bench, the man, a man of sixty-two, full grey beard, in a dark frock coat, holding up to the lamp a squat round glass bottle twelve centimetres high with two short straight necks plugged with cotton wool, inside it a thin pale dried strip of tissue hanging from a thread, five more plain unmarked bottles, a porcelain mortar, at the far end a physician in a black coat seen from directly behind, over a small glass syringe on a white cloth.
Who
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was a chemist, not a physician, and yet he became one of the fathers of modern medicine. Born in Dole in the French Jura into a family of tanners, he studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and returned there in 1857 as director of scientific studies. He showed that the ability of certain crystals and solutions to rotate polarised light was often linked to the shape of the crystals, and that fermentation is the work of living microorganisms, and he fought the doctrine of spontaneous generation. In 1865 he patented the process named after him, pasteurisation, against the "diseases" of wine. In 1868 a stroke left his left side partly paralysed. After that he developed vaccines from weakened microbes: against fowl cholera, anthrax and rabies. Funded by an international subscription, the Institut Pasteur opened in Paris in 1888. He lived there until 1895 and died at Marnes-la-Coquette on 28 September 1895. Rabies is still almost always fatal once symptoms appear; prompt vaccination after a bite prevents death.
The moment
On the morning of Monday, 6 July 1885, nine-year-old Joseph Meister from Alsace arrived with his mother at Pasteur's laboratory at the École normale supérieure. Two days earlier a rabid dog had bitten him fourteen times. Pasteur had protected dogs with a vaccine made from the spinal cords of rabid rabbits: pieces a few centimetres long hung in flasks in dry air and lost strength day by day. Because he was not a physician, he called in the neurologist Vulpian and the physician Grancher; Grancher took charge of the treatment. That evening the boy received his first injection, made from cord that had been drying since 21 June, for fifteen days. Over the next ten days came injections of ever fresher, and therefore stronger, cord. Joseph Meister never fell ill. The picture shows Pasteur on that evening, holding one of the drying flasks up to the lamp; at the far end of the bench a physician, seen from behind, stands over a small syringe.
The other side
The public account said Pasteur agreed to treat the boy only after making 50 dogs immune to rabies "without a single failure" and after similar success with large numbers of bitten dogs. His laboratory notebooks, which the family long kept from view, tell a different story. The historian Gerald Geison read them and wrote in 1995 that when Joseph Meister received his first injection, only ten unbitten dogs had received the first of several injections more than 30 days earlier, and no bitten dog had been treated the way the boy was. Émile Roux, the only medically qualified colleague who knew the true state of play, wanted nothing to do with the case. The verdict remains disputed: in 1997 M. F. Perutz replied that the dog was clearly rabid and that it would have been timid and heartless not to try.
What the sources leave open: How Pasteur's laboratory was furnished in 1885 is not described; room, lamp and furniture are typified, as are the shape and size of the flasks. All that is documented is that the pieces of cord hung in flasks in dry air. The time is recorded only as evening, and the number of injections is given differently. Whether Pasteur was in the room for the first injection is not certain. The child is left out of the picture on purpose.