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. Pasteur was not a physician and had no license to treat patients, meaning he risked criminal prosecution if the boy died. He injected Meister with progressively stronger doses of dried rabbit spinal cord infected with rabies over thirteen days. The boy survived. This was the first successful vaccination of a human against rabies, proving that artificially weakened pathogens could train the immune system to fight lethal infections. Pasteur's gamble launched the entire field of preventive immunology and led directly to vaccines for anthrax, cholera, and plague.
July 6, 1885
141 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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