Joseph Meister: Pasteur's First Rabies Patient and His 1940 Death

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In 1885, nine year old Joseph Meister was mauled by a rabid dog, which at the time meant near certain death once symptoms such as hydrophobia appeared. Louis Pasteur had developed a treatment from rabbit spinal cords infected with rabies and dried for days to weaken the virus, and it had worked in dogs. But Pasteur was a chemist, not a licensed physician, and a death could have brought charges. He consulted physicians Alfred Vulpian and Jacques-Joseph Grancher, who agreed the boy needed intervention and that the treatment was the only option. Over 11 days Meister received a series of injections, each less weakened than the last, and he never developed rabies.

Authorities chose not to pursue Pasteur, and Meister spent his working life as a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. German troops occupied the city on June 14, 1940, and on June 24 Meister, 64, took his own life. A long-repeated story says he did it rather than open Pasteur's crypt to German soldiers. A 1940 veterinary journal and his granddaughter's testimony tell a different account: he had sent his family away, lost contact, and came to believe they had been captured. They returned safely hours after his death.

How drying infected nerve tissue attenuated the virus while still training the immune system
The legal line Pasteur crossed by treating a patient without a medical license
Meister's decades guarding the institute built in part on his recovery
Child actor Dickie Moore playing him in the 1936 film The Story of Louis Pasteur
His story in the 1974 BBC series Microbes and Men and in Dark Matters: Twisted but True

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