OKLAHOMA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 21 



tically eliminated from France and has been controlled over the 

 rest of the civilized world ever since. 



He next turned to a study of puerperal, or child bed fever, and 

 discovered it is due to a microbe. He then authorized a course of 

 cleanliness and precautionary measures for the doctors and mid- 

 wives, which has saved the lives of millions of mothers. 



In spite of the fact that the sight often made Pasteur ill,, he and 

 his students haunted the hospitals of Paris studying human diseases. 

 One of his students, Roux, wrote : "How many times we have 

 seen him hastily leave the amphitheatre of the hospitals because 

 he was acutally ill ! But his love of science, his curiosity to know 

 the truth were even stronger ; he always came back on the morrow." 



Pasteur's crowning achievement was the cure of hydrophobia. 

 It is well known that formerly mad dogs were the terror of the 

 country side. All sorts of remedies had been proposed for those 

 who had been bitten. Pliny the Elder, advised that victims eat the 

 liver of the dog that had bitten them ; Gallian prescribed eating eyes 

 of crabs. In the middle ages oyster shell omelettes and cauterisa- 

 tion were prescribed; but a sure relief was the common practice of 

 smothering the unhappy sufferers to death between two mattresses. 



After a long series of experiments, Pasteur found he could 

 not attenuate the organisms of hydrophobia on artificial media, 

 as he was unable to isolate it. He then decided to attenuate it by 

 passing it from rabbit to rabbit. In these experiments he dis- 

 covered that the infected spinal cord lost in virulence in proportion 

 to the time is was exposed to the air so that one that had been 

 exposed for fifteen days was almost harmless, yet when a decoc- 

 tion of it was injected into dogs or other animals it gave them 

 immunity to hydrophobia. 



The nev/s that Pasteur was able to produce immunity in ani- 

 mals spread widely. His first human patient was Joseph Meister, 

 9 years old. who had been bitten 14 times by a mad dog in Alsace 

 and was in a lamentable condition. He was brought by his mother 

 who begged Pasteur to treat her son. A vaccine from a dried rab- 

 bit- cord 14 days old was made and injected into the boy's body. 

 Subsequent doses of greater virulence were administered and no 

 hydrophobia developed. 



The second patient was J. B. Jupille, a boy 15 years of age, 

 who had fought, bare handed and with no aid except his shepherd's 

 stick, a mad dog and killed it to save his five shepherd comrades, 

 but was terribly bitten and was in a worse condition than Meister 

 and moreover a week had elapsed before he presented himself for 

 treatment. The inoculations, however, were successful and he be- 



