414. THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



On i\Ionday, July 6, Pasteur saw a little Alsatian boy, 

 Joseph. Meister, enter his laboratory, accompanied by his 

 mother. He was only nine ye«rs old, and had been bitten 

 two days before by a mad dog at Meissengott, near Schlestadt. 



The child, going alone to school by a little by-road, had 

 been attacked by a furious dog and thrown to the ground. Too 

 small to defend himself, he had only thought of covering his 

 face with his hands. A bricklaj^er, seeing the scene from a 

 distance, arrived, and succeeded in beating ths dog off with an 

 iron bar; he picked up the boy, covered with blood and saliva. 

 The dog went back to his master, Theodore Vone, a grocer at 

 Meissengott, whom he bit on the arm. Vone seized a gun and 

 shot the animal, whose stomach was found to be full of hay, 

 straw, pieces of wood, etc. When little Meister 's parents 

 heard all these details they went, full of anxiety, to consult Dr. 

 Weber, at Ville, that same evening. After cauterizing the 

 wounds with carbolic. Dr. Weber advised Mme. Meister to 

 start for Paris, where she could relate the facts to one who was 

 not a physician, but who would be the best judge of what could 

 be done in such a serious case. Theodore Vone, anxious on 

 his own and on the child's account, decided to come also. 



Pasteur reassured him; his clothes had wiped off the dog^s 

 saliva, and his shirt-sleeve was intact. He might safely go 

 back to Alsace, and he promptly did so. 



Pasteur's emotion was great at the sight of the fourteen 

 wounds of the little boy, who suffered so much that he could 

 hardly walk. What should he do for this child? could he risk 

 the preventive treatment which had been constantly successful 

 €n his dogs? Pasteur was divided between his hopes and his 

 scruples, painful in their acuteness. Before deciding on a 

 course of action, he made arrangements for the comfort of this 

 poor woman and her child, alone in Paris, and gave them an 

 appointment for 5 o'cock, after the Institute meeting. He did 

 not wish to attempt anything without having seen Vulpian 

 and talked it over with him. Since the Rabies Commission 

 had been constituted, Pasteur had formed a growing esteem 

 for the great judgment of Vulpian, who, in his lectures on the 

 general and comparative physiology of the nervous system, 

 had already mentioned the profit to human clinics to be drawn 

 from experimenting on animals. 



His was a most prudent mind, always seeing all the aspects 

 of a problp.Toa. The man was worthy of the scientist: be was 



