A Useful and Effective Vaccine: For Rabies

In 1885, Louis Pasteur (not a doctor) was convinced by Jacques Joseph Grancher, (who was a doctor), to administer his then-experimental rabies vaccine to a young French boy, Joesph Meister, who had been bitten numerous times by a rabid dog.

Pasteur and his team were reluctant, as the vaccine was–at the time–still in the experimental stages and had hitherto been administered only to dogs and rabbits, and never to a human being in either the pre or the post-exposure stage.  But they were persuaded by Grancher’s pleas, and administer the vaccine to little Joseph, they did.

Amazingly, the boy survived the bites of the rabid dog (a heretofore inevitably fatal situation), and the renowned Pasteur Institute for Biomedical Research was formed just two years later.

This story speaks to me because the rabies vaccination saved my father’s life.

We were in Mubi, Northern Cameroons, in 1961, and Dad had been sent to investigate reports of a rabid dog in a nearby village, the bites from which dog had led to the deaths of several children.  Dad wound up being bitten by the dog himself, while trying to prevent another attack, and for the next forty-two days he underwent what was–at the time–the grueling and repeated post-exposure injected administration of large doses of the rabies vaccine directly into the abdomen. (Things have improved considerably from those days, thanks to modern medicine.)

At that time, a bite from a rabid dog was a death sentence, and when modern medical interventions were not always guaranteed because of the remote places in which we lived, I remember Dad  presiding at lunch one day when the conversation turned to rabid dogs and the prevalence of the disease in Nigeria and the Cameroons, much of it caused by half-wild “pye” dogs that roamed the countryside at will.

I remember the rain beating down on the tin roof.  And the meal  And almost every other detail.

And I remember Dad remarking, in a forceful sort of way, “If Louise was bitten by a rabid dog, I’d shoot her myself.”

Because he’d already seen the awful spectacle of what a death from rabies looked like:

Mubi was very bad for rabies and I shot more than one rabid dog while I was there. You dare not take chances, for there is no cure and only death from it. I once saw an eight-year old die of it.

And he didn’t want that for me.

It was a bit discombobulating at the time (which is probably why I remember it so clearly sixty-five years on.)

But I think I realized even then that Dad’s gruff sentiments came from a place of love.

240 years ago today, on July 6, 1885, Louis Pasteur and his colleagues administered the first-ever dose of the rabies vaccine to a human being, nine-year old Joseph Meister.

Joseph lived another fifty-five years, dying in 1940.  He committed suicide after, it is generally believed, trying to protect both his family and the Pasteur Institute from the depredations of the Wehrmacht.

Today, the rabies vaccine is widely and inexpensively available, and is recommended, even required, in many first-world countries for pet vaccinations.  Even if you live in a country in which humans don’t get rabies very often, please understand that bats, racoons, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and other wild animals can carry it widely, and vaccinate your pets against it.  If nothing else, an up-to-date rabies vaccination may spare their lives in the untoward event that they may–deservedly or undeservedly–one day bite someone.