July 6, 1885

Rabies vaccine

Joseph Meister begins Pasteur's experimental rabies treatment

The famous first injection was given by neither Pasteur nor Roux, but by the physician Jacques-Joseph Grancher.

8 p.m., 6 July 1885

On 6 July 1885, nine-year-old Joseph Meister was brought from Alsace to Louis Pasteur's Paris laboratory after a dog attack two days earlier left him with at least fourteen wounds. Pasteur judged the animal rabid from its behaviour and postmortem stomach contents.

Sixty hours after the attack, at 8 p.m., Meister received a subcutaneous injection made from a rabid rabbit's spinal cord that had been dried for fifteen days. Alfred Vulpian, consulted beforehand, was present.

Why Grancher gave the injection

Pasteur was a chemist, not a licensed physician. Jacques-Joseph Grancher, who had advised that the treatment be attempted, administered it.

Émile Roux had developed important rabbit-spinal-cord techniques but did not inject Meister — he objected to beginning human use at that stage.

A beginning, not a result

Nothing on 6 July established success. Further injections of progressively fresher, more virulent material followed through 16 July, thirteen inoculations over ten days, and only afterwards, with Meister still healthy, was the treatment called successful.

One survivor could not prove efficacy in any case, because exposure after a bite does not make infection or death certain. Pasteur's notebooks also record two earlier human attempts — a Mr. Girard in May and Julie-Antoinette Poughon in June.

Sources

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What the sources leave uncertain

Pasteur described the dog as certainly rabid based on its behavior and postmortem stomach contents, but no modern laboratory confirmation was possible.
Meister had not developed clinical rabies. Exposure after a bite does not mean infection or death was certain, so his survival alone could not constitute a controlled proof of efficacy.
Pasteur's notebooks record two earlier human inoculation attempts—Mr. Girard in May and Julie-Antoinette Poughon in June. Meister is best described as the first famous completed and apparently successful course, not unqualifiedly the first human ever injected.
The label 'successfully test on 6 July' is retrospective. On that date the treatment only began.