RABIES, OR HYDROPHOBIA 609 



several weeks, and Pasteur conceived that it would 

 be possible to anticipate the symptoms which would 

 naturally follow in a dog which had been bitten or 

 inoculated, by giving them a mild form of hydro- 

 phobia by the injection of attenuated virus of short 

 incubation period. These experiments showed that 

 it was possible to do this, and the outcome was the 

 introduction of a system of protective inoculation in 

 the human subject. Pasteur succeeded in giving 

 immunity from hydrophobia to about fifty dogs of 

 every age and breed. 



" In 1885, Joseph Meister, a boy nine years of age, 

 bitten badly by a mad dog upon the hands, legs, and 

 thighs, was brought to Pasteur. At a post-mortem 

 examination of the dog, its stomach was found full of 

 bits of hay, straw, and wood, and it had been un- 

 questionably rabid. On 6th July, sixty hours after 

 Meister had been bitten, a syringe full of marrow from 

 a rabbit which had died on 2ist June, and therefore 

 fifteen days old, was injected beneath the skin over 

 the right hypochondriac region. The next morning 

 Meister was inoculated with a spinal cord fourteen 

 days old, and so on every day, till on the sixteenth 

 a cord only one day old was used. So many in- 

 jections, however, need not have been given, as it 

 was subsequently found that the spinal marrows in- 

 jected during the first five days were inert when 

 tested on rabbits. The marrows of the next five 

 days showed an ascending scale of virulency, until, 

 on the last two days of the treatment, Meister had 

 been inoculated with a virus so virulent that it was 

 capable of causing hydrophobia in dogs after ten days' 

 incubation. Meister remained completely free from 

 hydrophobia. From that time to the present day, 

 many thousands of patients have been treated in 



2Q 



