July 6, 1885: The Administration of the First Successful Rabies Vaccination

July 6

Copy of Young Joseph Meister Portrait

In the summer of 1885, a 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was severely bitten by a rabid dog. As a result of the attack, Joseph sustained life-threatening injuries and faced a significant risk of developing rabies, a disease that offered him almost no chance of survival. Joseph’s mother, like any caring parent, sought every possible option to improve her son’s chances. She learned about the research of a French chemist named Louis Pasteur, who had been working on vaccination methods for rabies. Determined to save her son, she traveled to Pasteur’s location to plead for his help. Although Pasteur was hesitant to intervene, as he was not a licensed physician and considered it unethical, Joseph’s mother was able to persuade him to try to treat her son. On July 6, 1885, young Joseph became the first person ever to be successfully inoculated against rabies.

Pasteur’s method for developing a vaccine involved growing the rabies virus in healthy rabbits and then weakening the virus by drying out the infected tissue. Although this vaccine was developed by Émile Roux, a colleague of Pasteur who had previously administered the treatment to 50 dogs, Joseph Meister became the first recorded person to receive the regimen created by Roux. Over an 11-day period, Pasteur administered 13 inoculations against rabies to Joseph, using viruses that had been weakened for progressively shorter periods of time. After three months, Pasteur evaluated Joseph and found him to be in excellent health; rabies had never taken hold in his young body. As a result, Pasteur was celebrated as a hero, and his work became crucial in the development of vaccines.

After Meister’s successful treatment, many people sought rabies treatment from Pasteur. In 1886 alone, Pasteur successfully treated over 350 patients, with only one later developing rabies. As an adult, Meister worked for Pasteur at the Pasteur Institute until his death at the age of 64, when he tragically took his own life.