Joseph Meister was nine years old when a rabid dog bit him 14 times in July 1885. He lived in Alsace. His mother, Marie-Angélique, had heard of a scientist named Louis Pasteur who was vaccinating rabid dogs, so she went to Paris and begged him to save her son.
The boy was going to die without help. Rabies had no cure then, and everyone in the room knew it.
Pasteur’s own collaborators, Émile Roux among them, wanted no part of it. The vaccine had worked in dogs and rabbits. It had never touched a human being. The catch was obvious: if the boy died, the experiment would take the blame.
The doctor who pushed
Dr. Jacques Joseph Grancher decided the risk was worth taking. A tuberculosis specialist, he had met Pasteur in 1884 and soon became his medical advisor, working on the rabies research that produced the animal vaccine. Grancher talked Pasteur into letting him give the treatment himself.
For ten days he administered 12 doses of the vaccine. Less than a month later the result was plain. Meister had lived.
Meister, who died in 1940, was the first human being vaccinated with an artificially attenuated microbe. In 1935, on the 50th anniversary of the cure, he was filmed for a newsreel.
From one boy to an institute
News of the cure spread, and patients came from all over the world. The numbers got big enough that Grancher set up a dedicated vaccination center in an annex of the École Normale Supérieure, close to Pasteur’s laboratory.
He also helped build what came next. Grancher found the land for the Institut Pasteur and oversaw its construction. When the institute was inaugurated on November 14, 1888, he gave the opening address, and French President Sadi Carnot made him a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor the same day.
The Institut describes its early direction as the joint work of a laboratory scientist, Pasteur, and a clinician, Grancher. Consult your doctor for medical advice.
