1885

Pasteur’s first successful inoculation for rabies of nine-year-old Josef Meister and shortly thereafter, 15-year-old Jean-Baptiste Jupille (Ritvo, 193-94; Bäumler, 48-9; Geison, 206-218) via his new method of attenuation: “Instead of passing the virus through monkeys, they now attenuated it by extracting spinal cords from rabbits dead of the ‘fixed’ rabies virus, cutting them into strips several centimeters long, and then suspending these spinal strips from a thread inside a flask with two cotton-stoppered holes at the top and near the bottom. . . . Infected rabbit spinal strips that were suspended in this filtered, desiccated air gradually lost their virulence vis-à-vis dogs, becoming harmless after a period of time . . .” [It was a matter of drying out the infected spinal marrow; the drier the less potent the virus]. Vaccination of Meister and then Jupille by series of injections of sterilized broth containing a small piece of one of the drying marrows ground up. He began with a marrow old enough to make sure it was not at all virulent then, progressively, injections with ground-up fresher marrows, until final inoculation with a very virulent marrow that had been drying only a day or two (Geison, 212-215). On December 2 in Newark, a rabid dog bit six children, who, via a public campaign, arrived in Paris on December 21 for treatment by Pasteur, with attendant national publicity spearheaded by NY Herald, NY Sun, NY World and NY Times. The Newark boys’ trip to Paris “prompted so much sustained attention by the press and the public as to change popular expectations about medicine more generally. . . . As a result, Pasteur’s rabies treatment . . . stimulated a series of events and expectations that set a pattern through which later discoveries would be experienced. . . . an entirely new idea became embedded in popular consciousness: that medical research could provide widespread benefits” (Hansen, 374, 375). “In a novel fashion, the hydrophobia drama – because it captured the popular imagination – disseminated effectively, if not intentionally, a new image of the value of experimental research in medicine, helping to create a new expectation of continuing medical advances and implicitly encouraging public commitment to such research”(402).