294 PASTEUR: THE HISTORY OF A MIND 



V 



STUDIES ON RABIES 



Although it was these experiments at Pouilly-le- 

 Fort and the anthrax vaccinations which first overcame 

 the general scepticism regarding the new doctrines, 

 it was the prophylaxis for rabies which gave them the 

 great place in public confidence which they now enjoy. 

 We cannot fail to recognize that, from this point of view, 

 this disease was well chosen. It has, fundamentally, 

 no importance. The mortality which it causes is slight. 

 Man can protect himself from it without any scientific 

 apparatus, simply by police measures, as is done in 

 Germany, and that country may well scoff at us, since 

 without any Institute for fighting rabies, she had less 

 deaths from it throughout the whole empire than we 

 have in Paris. But rabies has a hold on the public 

 imagination; it evokes legendary visions of raging 

 victims, inspiring terror in all those in their vicinity, 

 bound and howling, or asphyxiated between two 

 mattresses. 



The reality is much more simple and calm, and few 

 deaths are more peaceful than certain deaths from 

 rabies, but it was easy to foresee that a victory over this 

 disease would be reckoned none the less as a great one. 

 Only it did not seem easy. In the first place, while rabies 

 might pass with the public for a virus disease, it had not 

 that character for the physician or the surgeon, because 

 every man and every animal that contracted it died 

 from it, and it was consequently impossible to know 

 whether it would recur in the same individual. In the 

 second place, the only means of transmitting it was by 

 having a mad animal bite another animal, or by 

 inoculating it with saliva from a rabid animal, but this 



