Pasteur's rabies vaccine

Rabies was fatal and had no cure. Louis Pasteur took it up in 1880 because it struck animals as well as people, so he could experiment on them. The virus could not be seen with the microscopes of the day, so with Émile Roux he passed the disease from brain to brain, first in dogs and then in rabbits. Spinal cords from infected rabbits, hung to dry in flasks, lost their virulence as they dried, and dogs given a series of progressively fresher cords became resistant. By 1885 Pasteur had protected 50 dogs this way without a failure.

On Monday 6 July 1885 three people arrived at his laboratory from Alsace: a grocer, Théodore Vone, bitten on the arm two days earlier by his own dog, which had gone mad; Joseph Meister, aged nine, whom the same dog had knocked down and bitten on the hand, legs and thighs; and the boy's mother. The physicians Vulpian and Jacques Joseph Grancher counted 14 wounds on Joseph and judged that rabies was almost certain.

Pasteur was not a physician, and several of his collaborators, Roux among them, did not want to try the method on a person. Grancher gave the injections. At 8 in the evening, 60 hours after the bites, half a syringe of rabbit spinal cord that had dried for 15 days went under the skin of the boy's upper right abdomen. Over ten days he received 13 injections of ever fresher cord, ending with material that gave rabbits rabies within a week. Meister never fell ill.

The Académie des Sciences heard the case on 26 October 1885, along with the treatment Pasteur had just begun of Jean-Baptiste Jupille, a 15-year-old shepherd from the Jura bitten while fighting off a dog that attacked six younger boys. Bitten people then came from all over France and abroad, and the clinic set up for them grew into the Institut Pasteur, opened on 14 November 1888 after a public appeal.

By 1890 treatment centers were running in Budapest, Madras, Algiers, São Paulo, Shanghai, Chicago and New York, among other cities. CDC's centennial article noted that the old brain-tissue version still needed daily injections for 14 to 21 days and carried the same risk of neurological harm as in Pasteur's day.