Pasteur's Rabies Vaccine (1885): Saving the Boy Joseph Meister

On 6 July 1885 Louis Pasteur’s team in Paris began injecting nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been savagely bitten by a rabid dog, with an experimental rabies vaccine. The boy survived, and the news made Pasteur a hero across the world. The case marked the first use of a laboratory-made vaccine against rabies in a human, led to the founding of the Pasteur Institute and remains one of the most famous, and debated, episodes in medical history.

Background: a terrifying disease

Rabies, also called hydrophobia, was one of the most feared diseases of the nineteenth century. Spread mainly by the bites of infected dogs and wolves, it attacks the nervous system after an incubation period of weeks or months, causing agitation, spasms, fear of water and death. Once symptoms appear it is almost always fatal, and there was no effective treatment beyond cauterising the wound.

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was a French chemist who had made his name with studies of crystals, fermentation and the spoiling of wine and beer, which led to pasteurisation. In the late 1870s he turned to infectious disease, in competition with Robert Koch in Germany. Pasteur developed weakened, or attenuated, vaccines against chicken cholera and anthrax, the latter demonstrated publicly on sheep at Pouilly-le-Fort in 1881. He called them vaccines in honour of Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine.

Developing the rabies vaccine

Pasteur began work on rabies in 1880 with colleagues including Émile Roux and Charles Chamberland. The cause, a virus, was too small to be seen with microscopes of the time, so the team could not grow it in a dish. Instead they found that the disease could be passed reliably by injecting infected nervous tissue into the brains of animals.

By passing rabies repeatedly through rabbits, they obtained a “fixed” form with a predictable incubation period. Roux developed a method of hanging pieces of infected rabbit spinal cord in sterile flasks to dry for different numbers of days; the longer the drying, the weaker the material became. Dogs given a series of injections, from the most weakened cord to the freshest, appeared to become resistant to rabies.

The treatment of Joseph Meister

Joseph Meister lived in Meissengott, in Alsace, which had been part of Germany since 1871. On 4 July 1885 he was attacked by a rabid dog and bitten many times on the hands and legs. A local doctor advised his mother to take him to Pasteur in Paris, where they arrived on 6 July.

Pasteur consulted the physicians Alfred Vulpian and Jacques-Joseph Grancher, who judged that the boy was very likely to develop rabies. Because Pasteur was not a medical doctor, Grancher administered the injections. The first was given on the evening of 6 July, using spinal cord that had been dried for about two weeks. Over the next ten days Meister received 13 injections of progressively fresher and more virulent material.

Meister did not develop rabies. In October 1885 Pasteur treated a second patient, Jean-Baptiste Jupille, a fifteen-year-old shepherd who had been bitten while protecting younger children from a rabid dog. On 26 October 1885 Pasteur reported both cases to the Academy of Sciences.

Fame and controversy

The announcement caused a sensation. Bitten people travelled to Paris from across Europe and beyond, including a group of Russian peasants attacked by a rabid wolf near Smolensk and four children sent from Newark in the United States. Within months hundreds had been treated, and Pasteur reported that very few died.

Not everyone was convinced. Some doctors argued that many of those treated had never been infected, since only a fraction of people bitten by rabid animals develop the disease, and a few patients died despite or perhaps because of the treatment. When the historian Gerald Geison studied Pasteur’s private notebooks in the 1990s, he concluded that Pasteur had not completed the dog experiments with the exact method used on Meister before treating him, raising ethical questions about how the first human trial was conducted. Historians still debate how far those concerns should qualify Pasteur’s achievement.

Key people

• Louis Pasteur (1822–1895): French chemist and microbiologist who directed the rabies research and decided to treat Meister.
• Émile Roux (1853–1933): physician and Pasteur’s close collaborator, who developed the method of drying infected spinal cords; he later directed the Pasteur Institute.
• Jacques-Joseph Grancher (1843–1907): paediatrician who gave Meister’s injections and supervised the clinical treatment of patients.
• Alfred Vulpian (1826–1887): eminent physician who examined Meister and supported the decision to treat him.
• Joseph Meister (1876–1940): the first person to receive the treatment.
• Jean-Baptiste Jupille: the second patient, whose courage in fighting off a rabid dog was later honoured with a statue at the Pasteur Institute.

The Pasteur Institute

In 1886 an international public subscription was launched to build an institute for rabies treatment and research. Donations came from governments, wealthy patrons and ordinary people. The Pasteur Institute was inaugurated on 14 November 1888 on the rue Dutot in Paris, in the presence of President Sadi Carnot. It soon became a leading centre of microbiology, and a network of Pasteur institutes later spread around the world.

Joseph Meister later worked at the institute as a caretaker. He died in Paris on 24 June 1940, during the German occupation, apparently by suicide. A popular story claims he did so after refusing to open Pasteur’s crypt to German soldiers, but this account is not supported by reliable evidence.

Myths and facts

Myth: Pasteur personally injected Joseph Meister. Fact: As a chemist without a medical licence, Pasteur decided on the treatment and prepared the material, but the injections were given by the physician Jacques-Joseph Grancher.

Myth: Pasteur discovered the rabies virus. Fact: Pasteur never saw the cause of rabies and did not know it was a virus. Viruses were first recognised as a separate kind of infectious agent in the 1890s, and the rabies virus could only be seen with electron microscopes in the twentieth century.

Myth: Meister was certain to die without treatment. Fact: His bites were severe and the risk was high, but not everyone bitten by a rabid animal develops rabies, so his survival alone could not prove the treatment worked. The steady results over many later patients were more convincing.

Legacy

Pasteur’s dried-cord method was gradually replaced by safer vaccines, and modern rabies vaccines grown in cell cultures are given after a bite together with antibodies. Prompt treatment is highly effective, yet rabies still kills tens of thousands of people a year, mostly children in Asia and Africa. World Rabies Day is held on 28 September, the anniversary of Pasteur’s death in 1895. Pasteur’s work, alongside later successes such as the Salk polio vaccine, helped establish vaccination as a cornerstone of public health.

Timeline

• 1880: Pasteur’s laboratory begins research on rabies.
• 1881, May: Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine is tested publicly at Pouilly-le-Fort.
• 1885, 4 July: Joseph Meister is bitten by a rabid dog in Alsace.
• 1885, 6 July: Meister receives his first injection in Paris.
• 1885, 16 July: Meister’s course of 13 injections ends; he remains well.
• 1885, 20 October: Jean-Baptiste Jupille begins treatment.
• 1885, 26 October: Pasteur reports his results to the Academy of Sciences.
• 1888, 14 November: The Pasteur Institute is inaugurated in Paris.
• 1895, 28 September: Louis Pasteur dies near Paris.

Why it matters

The treatment of Joseph Meister showed that a vaccine could be made in the laboratory against a disease whose cause could not even be seen, and that it could protect someone already infected. It made Pasteur a symbol of scientific medicine and gave rise to one of the world’s great research institutes, while the debate over his methods still informs discussions of medical ethics.