Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister
- Date
- 6 July 1885
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- France (Paris)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
On 6 July 1885 the French chemist Louis Pasteur, with physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher and Alfred Vulpian, administered an experimental rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog days earlier.
Over ten days the boy received a graded course of injections prepared from the dried, progressively more virulent spinal cords of rabbits infected with attenuated rabies virus. Meister survived and did not develop the otherwise almost invariably fatal disease, demonstrating that immunisation could be used after exposure to prevent a deadly infection. The success, presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1886, was a landmark in the development of vaccines and validated the principle of attenuating pathogens to confer immunity, which Pasteur had earlier applied to fowl cholera and anthrax. It capped the establishment of germ theory in medicine, alongside Robert Koch's identification of the microbes causing anthrax (1876) and tuberculosis (1882), and led to the founding of the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1888, a model for medical research worldwide.
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Empires active in 6 July 1885
- German Empire1871 CE – 1918 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Daguerre's Photographic Process Announced1839
- Germ Theory of Disease Established by Pasteur and Koch1882 (Koch's tuberculosis bacillus, 24 March)
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Discovery of X-rays and radioactivity1895–1898
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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