Joseph Meister, 9, was the first person saved by rabies vaccine

On 6 July 1885, nine-year-old Joseph Meister became the first person known to be saved by Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, receiving his first injection about 60 hours after a rabid dog bit him 14 times in Alsace. Once symptoms appear, rabies is almost always fatal, and in 1885 there was no treatment of any kind.

Pasteur was a chemist, not a physician, so his medical colleagues were present and Dr Jacques Grancher gave the injections: a dozen or more injections of rabbit spinal-cord preparations over about ten days, each dose carrying stronger virus than the last and each first tested on healthy rabbits. Pasteur later explained his reasoning:

“Since the death of the child appeared inevitable, I resolved, though not without great anxiety, to try the method which had proved consistently successful on the dogs.”

Was Meister really the first?

He was the first to survive, not the first treated. Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks, opened to the public only in the 1970s and studied by historian Gerald Geison, record two earlier attempts: a 60-year-old man who left hospital after a single injection and never returned, and a 10-year-old girl who died before she could receive a second dose. They also show that his public claims of reliable success on dogs were overstated.

What happened to Joseph Meister?

He went to work for the institute his treatment helped found. Built on the success of the treatment, the Institut Pasteur was inaugurated in Paris on 14 November 1888, and Meister later worked there as its concierge.

His death in June 1940 produced a second legend: that he killed himself rather than let German troops open Pasteur’s crypt. Researchers Héloïse Dufour and Sean Carroll, working from a colleague’s diary, archives and his granddaughter’s recollections, found a sadder story. His wife and children had fled Paris weeks earlier, and Meister came to believe the Germans had killed them. They returned, alive, later that same day.