Louis Pasteur first used his rabies vaccine on a human
On this day · 6 July 1885
A 9-year-old bitten by a rabid dog became the first person treated with Pasteur's vaccine, and lived.
On July 6, 1885, chemist Louis Pasteur authorized an experimental treatment that no one had ever tried on a human. Two days earlier, 9-year-old Joseph Meister had been mauled by a rabid dog in Alsace. Rabies, once symptoms appeared, was effectively a death sentence.
Over the following ten days, Meister received a series of injections of spinal-cord tissue carrying progressively stronger forms of the virus, so his body could build defenses before the infection took hold. Pasteur, not a physician, had the doses administered by medical colleagues.
The boy never developed rabies, becoming the first human ever saved by the vaccine.
The result electrified the world and validated the idea that a vaccine could halt a disease after exposure. Within three years, public donations funded the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which still researches infectious disease today. Meister himself later worked there as a gatekeeper, a quiet coda to one of medicine’s boldest gambles.
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