Who invented vaccination for rabies

One hot July morning in , feverish little Joseph Meister was dragged by his frantic mother through the streets of Paris in search of an unknown scientist who, according to rumors, could prevent rabies. For nine-year-old Joseph had been bitten in 14 places by a huge, mad dog and in a desperate attempt to cheat death, his mother had fled from their home town in Alsace to Paris.

Early in the afternoon Mme Meister met a young physician in a hospital. Bacteriologist Louis Pasteur, who kept kennels of mad dogs in a crowded little laboratory and was hounded by medical criticism, had never tried his rabies vaccine on a human being before. But moved by the tears of Mme Meister, he finally took the boy to the Hotel-Dieu, had him injected with material from the spinal cord of a rabbit that had died from rabies. Louis Pasteur successfully gave the first anti-rabies vaccination to nine-year-old Joseph Meister.

Did you know July is the historic month that the rabies vaccination was the first given to a human? On July 6, there was a major step forward in modern medicine. Although not certain the vaccine would work, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur successfully gave the first anti-rabies vaccination to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by an infected dog. He was the first to discover molecular chirality and spontaneous resolution while studying crystallography. He studied fermentation, demonstrating that it is a chemical process carried out by microscopic organisms.

These findings gave him the information necessary to disprove the myth of spontaneous generation and to propose methods for preventing the growth of bacteria in food items. His name quickly became a household word for food safety, e. Louis Pasteur in This finding led him to propose the germ theory, which simplistically states that many diseases are caused by microorganisms too small to see without magnification.

The germ theory would revolutionize the medical world and have a number of important practical consequences, including increased hygiene standards in the medical community and a newfound interest in disease-causing bacteria in the research community. By the early s, Pasteur had already established himself as a renowned leader in research, and in Pasteur began to fully immerse himself in the study of disease.

At the time, Pasteur was studying chicken cholera Pasteurella multocida , a diarrhoeal disease that was destroying the breeding chicken population. Influenced by Edward Jenner , Pasteur reasoned that if a vaccine could be found for smallpox, vaccines could be found for all diseases.

By , Pasteur had succeeded in culturing the causative virulent bacteria of chicken cholera and began inoculating chickens. However, many chickens died after the procedure so Pasteur continued to study the disease, looking for safer inoculation methods.

It was during this study that Pasteur changed the field of virology forever. In , Pasteur observed, by chance, that old bacterial cultures lost their virulence.

The assistant forgot to do this, however, and then himself went on holiday. The inoculated chickens developed mild symptoms but recovered fully. Another scientist might have concluded that the cultures had mostly died, but Pasteur was intrigued. He injected the recovered chickens with freshly cultured cholera bacteria.

When the birds remained healthy, Pasteur reasoned that exposure to oxygen had caused the loss of virulence. He found that sealed bacterial cultures maintained their virulence, whereas those exposed to air for differing periods of time before inoculation showed a predictable decline in virulence. Pasteur, along with Charles Chamberland and Emile Roux, went on to develop a live attenuated vaccine for anthrax.

Unlike cultures of the chicken cholera bacterium, Bacillus anthracis cultures exposed to air readily formed spores that remained highly virulent irrespective of culture duration; indeed, Pasteur reported that anthrax spores isolated from soil where animals that died of anthrax had been buried 12 years previously remained as virulent as fresh cultures.

A control group of 24 sheep, 1 goat and 4 cows remained unvaccinated. On 31 May all the animals were inoculated with freshly isolated anthrax bacilli, and the results were examined on 2 June.