Pasteur Saves a Boy: Rabies Vaccine's First Success

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.