Puzzle No. 88: Chain

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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Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

Before Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

After Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

After Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister

After Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister