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Paris, France
140 years ago

On July 6, 1885, the chemist Louis Pasteur faced an agonizing decision. A nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been brought to him, having been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog two days earlier. Rabies, once symptoms appeared, was invariably fatal — a horrifying death involving fever, hydrophobia, paralysis, and madness. Pasteur had developed an experimental vaccine that had worked in dogs, but had never been tested on a human. Without treatment, the boy would almost certainly die. Pasteur, who was not a physician, decided to administer the vaccine.

Over the following ten days, Meister received a series of thirteen injections of increasingly virulent rabies material — a weakened form of the virus that Pasteur had developed by drying the spinal cords of infected rabbits. The treatment was designed to build the boy's immunity faster than the disease could develop. It was a desperate gamble. Meister did not develop rabies. He survived, and lived a normal life, dying decades later in 1940.

Pasteur was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century science. Before the rabies vaccine, he had already disproved spontaneous generation, established the germ theory of disease, developed the process of pasteurization that bears his name, and created vaccines for chicken cholera and anthrax. His work fundamentally transformed medicine, agriculture, and food safety, saving an incalculable number of lives. The rabies vaccine was, in some ways, the capstone of a career that had already changed the world.

The treatment of Joseph Meister was scientifically and ethically fraught. Pasteur was not a licensed physician and could have faced serious legal consequences had the boy died. He consulted with physicians before proceeding and agonized over the decision. The success of the treatment was not guaranteed — and some medical historians have noted that not everyone bitten by a rabid animal develops rabies, complicating the interpretation of any single case. But the treatment of Meister, followed by the successful treatment of a shepherd boy who had been badly bitten while protecting other children, established the vaccine's effectiveness.

The success made Pasteur an international hero and led to the founding of the Pasteur Institute in 1888, funded by donations from around the world, which became one of the leading centers of biomedical research in history. The institute has produced ten Nobel laureates and made fundamental contributions to the understanding of diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio, influenza, yellow fever, plague, and HIV. Joseph Meister, the boy Pasteur saved, grew up to become the gatekeeper of the Pasteur Institute, where Pasteur was entombed.

On July 6, 1885, a chemist who wasn't a doctor injected an untested vaccine into a nine-year-old boy who would otherwise have died of rabies. The boy lived. The gamble founded modern immunology, created one of the world's great research institutions, and saved millions of lives that followed. The boy grew up to guard Pasteur's tomb.

How much do you know about Louis Pasteur, the first rabies vaccine, the principle of attenuation, germ theory, and the founding of the Pasteur Institute?