De Zouche. — Bacteria and their Belation to Disease. 49 



a rabid animal. Dogs and animals so protected are said to 

 have been rendered "refractory" to the virus. M. Pasteur 

 now conceived the idea that if dogs had been bitten by rabid 

 dogs the disease already in the system might be attacked and 

 conquered, and the dogs saved, by inoculating portions of the 

 virus in the same manner. The result bore out his anticipa- 

 tions. Dogs which were bitten and inoculated recovered, 

 others not so protected died. What if this method could 

 prevent hydrophobia in man? On the (Jth July, 1<S85, there 

 was brought unexpectedly to the laboratory of M. Pasteur a 

 boy named Joseph Meister, aged nine years. The boy had 

 been bitten in several places — on the hands, on the legs 

 and thighs, so that he walked with difficulty. The same 

 evening M. Pasteur began the treatment by inoculations, con- 

 tinuing them for twelve days, until he had used a virus only 

 one day old. The result was that this boy, who had the seeds 

 of a fatal disease in his system, recovered perfectly without 

 having suffered beyond the mere wounds. 



Since the memorable date on wdiich Joseph Meister was 

 treated about 150 persons have come each month to the Pas- 

 teur Institute for antirabic inoculations. Up to the 21st March, 

 1889, 6,870 persons have been treated there, many of them 

 very severely wounded. The mortality of persons so treated 

 has been 1 per cent., the usual mortality after the bites of 

 rabid dogs being 15 per cent. The success in these inocula- 

 tions is due to the slowness with which the virus after a bite 

 usually reaches the nervous centres. In man the average 

 incubation- stage is six or seven weeks. It may, of course, be 

 shorter or much longer. But should the virus reach the brain 

 and the spinal cord very quickly, by means of the blood- 

 stream, inoculative treatment may be too late. Such cases 

 constitute the 1 per cent, of those treated which end fatally, 

 as in bites about the face. In severe cases the treatment has 

 to be very active, spinal cords a few days old being used almost 

 at once, instead of beginning with cords of fourteen days. 

 And here I let M. Eoux, M. Pasteur's collaborator, use his 

 own words. He says, " The most remarkable point, how- 

 ever, in the whole discovery of this preventive inoculation 

 against rabies is that it has been carried out, the virus itself 

 being still unknown. Not only do we not know how to culti- 

 vate it outside the body, but in allowing it really to be a 

 microbe w^e can do so by analogy, for as yet no one has been 

 able to isolate it. Notwithstanding this, however, it is daily 

 being attenuated, and made to pass through the various stages 

 of virulence. Unable to cultivate the organism artificially in 

 flasks and tubes, M. Pasteur has been obliged to do so in the 

 rabbit ; and so easily and with such perfect regularity are these 

 cultivations in the living animal performed that they are ready 

 4 



