Louis Pasteur and Rabies

The story of Joseph, Louis Pasteur and Rabies

The little boy was standing in the hallway, crying pitifully as people bustled about him. His mother stood nearby, wringing her hands and begging to see the famous doctor. The boy was only nine years old and his name was Joseph Meister.

Joseph had been playing happily near his home in the Alsatian hills of France, when a rabid dog suddenly attacked him. The dog would have killed him but for the intervention of a bricklayer who drove the beast off. As it was, little Joseph had been bitten fourteen times.

Rabies in the 1880s

The year was 1885. There was no known treatment or cure for rabies, or hydrophobia as it was called in humans. Hydrophobia means fear of water, but the disease didn't actually make people afraid of water. Instead, rabies victims would suffer a terrible thirst so that the sight of water sometimes made them swallow. And swallowing was very painful because one of the symptoms of the disease was throat spasms. There were other symptoms too, all of them agonizing - extreme restlessness, rage, shuddering, convulsions, paralysis, choking - and eventually death. Sometimes the symptoms didn't appear for a week or more, but when they did, it was just a matter of time.

Little Joseph wasn't showing any symptoms yet but there was no doubt he would. The boy had been savagely attacked and the dog had been frothing at the mouth and acting wild and confused. Everyone knew it was rabid. And everyone knew what came next. The mother's eyes were red with crying and the boy too was sobbing now - he was in pain, but more than that he knew that everybody believed he was going to die.

The desperate mother had come to the only man she thought might have a chance of saving her child. He had saved many people's lives, this brilliant scientist in his magical laboratory in Villeneuve l'Etang. Of course, none of those people had suffered from rabies. But she had heard he was studying rabies. Perhaps he could work yet another of his miracles.

Louis Pasteur and his rabies experiments

Louis Pasteur heard the commotion from his laboratory and came out to see what the fuss was about. When he saw the little boy and heard the mother's story, his heart was torn in two. It was his natural impulse to do anything he could to relieve suffering. Louis Pasteur himself had lost three children to disease, three beautiful little girls, and he couldn't bear the idea of not doing something to save the little boy weeping before him. But no one had ever tried to treat rabies before - the very treatment itself might kill the child.

Louis Pasteur and Rabies research

Louis Pasteur had been researching rabies for several months. Louis Pasteur knew a virus so small it couldn't even be seen through his microscope caused it. Louis Pasteur also knew it tended to concentrate in nerve tissue. With that in mind, he had prepared vaccines from the spinal cords of rabid animals, using the same principles he'd used in making other vaccines.

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