July 6 in History

Nine-year-old Joseph Meister had been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog when his mother brought him to Louis Pasteur s laboratory in Paris. Rabies was a death sentence — once symptoms appeared, no patient had ever survived. Pasteur had been testing a rabies vaccine on dogs for years but had never tried it on a human being. On July 6, 1885, he made the decision to inoculate the boy, knowing that failure meant watching a child die of one of the most horrifying diseases known to medicine. Pasteur was not a physician. He was a chemist who had already transformed medicine by proving that microorganisms cause disease, developing pasteurization, and creating vaccines for anthrax and chicken cholera. His rabies vaccine used dried spinal cord tissue from infected rabbits, progressively weakened by exposure to air over several days. The theory was that injecting increasingly potent preparations would train the immune system to fight the virus before it reached the brain. Meister received thirteen injections over eleven days, each containing slightly more virulent material than the last. The treatment was agonizing for both patient and scientist. Pasteur barely slept during the course of injections, terrified that he might kill the boy instead of saving him. Two physicians administered the shots, since Pasteur lacked a medical license. Weeks passed with no symptoms. Meister survived. News of the successful treatment spread across Europe. Within a year, 2,500 people had traveled to Pasteur s laboratory for vaccination, and the success rate exceeded 99 percent. Donations poured in from around the world to fund the Pasteur Institute, which opened in 1888 and remains one of the world s leading biomedical research centers. The rabies vaccine established the principle that post-exposure vaccination could prevent disease even after infection — a concept that seemed impossible to most physicians of the era. Joseph Meister worked as a gatekeeper at the Pasteur Institute for most of his adult life. He committed suicide in 1940 when German soldiers occupying Paris ordered him to open Pasteur s burial crypt. He refused to let them desecrate the tomb of the man who had saved his life.

The Frank family had been preparing their disappearance for months when sixteen-year-old Margot Frank received a call-up notice from the SS on July 5, 1942, ordering her to report for a "work camp" in Germany. Otto Frank accelerated the plan. The next morning, the family left their apartment in Amsterdam s River Quarter, wearing multiple layers of clothing because carrying suitcases would attract attention, and walked through the rain to the secret annex above Otto s pectin and spice company at 263 Prinsengracht. Otto Frank, a German-Jewish businessman who had moved his family to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution, had been stockpiling food and furnishings in the hidden rooms behind a moveable bookcase for over a year. Four employees — Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl — knew about the hiding place and risked their lives daily to supply the residents with food, news, and human contact. Anne Frank was thirteen years old and had received a red-and-white plaid diary for her birthday three weeks earlier. She began writing on June 12, 1942, addressing her entries to an imaginary friend named Kitty. In the annex, her diary became her primary companion. Over the next two years, she filled the original diary and several additional notebooks with observations that ranged from teenage frustrations about sharing space with adults to sophisticated reflections on human nature, war, and her own identity. Eight people lived in the annex: Otto and Edith Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. They could not make noise during business hours, could not look out windows, and could not leave. The confinement lasted 761 days. On August 4, 1944, German police raided the annex after receiving a tip. All eight residents were arrested and deported. Anne and Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, weeks before British forces liberated the camp. Otto Frank was the sole survivor. Miep Gies had saved Anne s diary, and Otto published it in 1947. Translated into over 70 languages, it became one of the most widely read books in history.

The big top of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin wax dissolved in gasoline — essentially turning the canvas tent into a giant firebomb. On July 6, 1944, with roughly 7,000 people packed inside for the afternoon matinee performance, a small fire started along the sidewall. Within eight minutes, 168 people were dead and over 700 injured in one of the worst fire disasters in American history. The fire broke out during the Great Wallendas high-wire act, and many spectators initially thought the flames were part of the show. Bandmaster Merle Evans immediately ordered the band to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever," the traditional circus distress signal that told performers and crew an emergency was underway. But the paraffin-gasoline waterproofing caused the canvas to burn with extraordinary speed, and molten wax rained down on the crowd below. Panic compounded the fire s lethality. The main exit at the southwest end of the tent was blocked by the steel-barred chutes used for the animal acts that had just concluded. Spectators crushed against the barriers. Others were trapped in the wooden bleacher seating that collapsed as supports burned through. Most of the dead were women and children attending the midweek matinee. Many victims were burned beyond recognition. Five circus employees were charged with involuntary manslaughter. The Hartford city government faced intense scrutiny for lax fire safety inspections. The disaster led to sweeping reforms in fire safety codes nationwide, including mandatory fireproofing of large tent structures and requirements for multiple unobstructed exits. The circus itself paid out nearly $5 million in claims, equivalent to roughly $85 million today. One victim, a girl approximately six years old, was never identified despite extensive efforts. Known as "Little Miss 1565" after her case number at the Hartford morgue, she became the enduring symbol of the tragedy. A Hartford detective spent decades trying to identify her. The mystery was not resolved until 1991, when a fire department lieutenant matched her to a missing person report for Eleanor Emily Cook, though the identification remains disputed.

Sir Thomas More mounted the scaffold at the Tower of London on July 6, 1535, and reportedly told his executioner, "I pray you, I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself." The wry humor was characteristic of a man who had been Lord Chancellor of England, the most celebrated humanist scholar in Europe, and a friend of kings — until his conscience put him on the wrong side of Henry VIII s religious revolution. More had served Henry VIII loyally for decades, rising through diplomatic and legal posts to become Lord Chancellor in 1529, the highest non-royal office in the realm. He was also a devoted Catholic who had written extensively against the Protestant Reformation, including burning heretics during his time as Chancellor — a fact his later admirers have sometimes preferred to overlook. The crisis came when Henry sought to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. When Pope Clement VII refused the annulment, Henry broke with Rome entirely, declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church of England through the Act of Supremacy in 1534. More resigned the chancellorship rather than support the break. His silence was deafening — the most prominent intellectual in England refused to endorse the king s new religious order. Silence was not enough for Henry. The Treason Act of 1534 made it a capital offense to deny the king s supremacy over the church. More was imprisoned in the Tower of London for fifteen months, during which he wrote devotional works and maintained his refusal to take the oath acknowledging royal supremacy. At his trial, Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, testified that More had explicitly denied the king s authority in a private conversation. More called Rich a perjurer, but the jury convicted him in fifteen minutes. More was beheaded rather than subjected to the full traitor s death of hanging, drawing, and quartering — a mercy from the king. The Catholic Church canonized him as a saint in 1935, exactly four hundred years after his execution. His book Utopia, written in 1516, gave the English language its word for an ideal society.