112 
Pasteur and his Work, 
each day a more recent fragment (an interval of two days' 
drying between each piece), until the last was reached, and 
which was very virulent, being only one or two days in the flask. 
After this the animal could be inoculated beneath the skin or on 
the surface of the brain with the most active virus, and rabies 
vi^ould not follow. 
Pasteur had inoculated fifty dogs of all ages and breeds, and 
rendered every one of them proof against the disease, when, 
unexpectedly, on July 6th, 1885, three individuals from Alsace 
arrived at his laboratory ; two of them brought a boy nine years 
old, said to have been worried by a rabid dog on the 4th of that 
month, and the wounds, fourteen in number, gave evidence of 
this. Two professors of medicine saw the boy on the same day 
as Pasteur, and from the history of the case and the nature 
of the injuries, it was considered a desperate one — death from 
hydrophobia appearing inevitable. 
i Pasteur therefore decided, though not, it may be imagined, 
without grave misgivings, to practise on this child the method 
of protection which had invariably succeeded with dogs, even 
after they had been bitten by rabid ones. The step was a 
terribly venturesome one, and nothing but the apparently hope- 
less position of the patient, and the confidence in his method 
begotten by uniform success, could have endowed him with 
courage, or inspired him with hope, in undertaking by far the 
most formidable and most anxious task of his lifetime. 
The disease is horribly agonising and dreadful — more so, 
perhaps, than any other which afflicts humanity ; and while 
Pasteur was naturally anxious to save the boy from it, the risk 
was fearfully great that the very means employed to do this 
might produce it. 
On the evening of July 6th — sixty hours after he was wounded 
— the boy received the first subcutaneous injection of spinal 
marrow, obtained from a rabid rabbit fifteen days before, and 
kept since then in a flask of dry air. The following days' 
inoculations were made in the same region — beneath the skin of 
the abdomen ; so that thirteen inoculations were given in ten 
days, though Pasteur believed that a less number would have 
sufficed. The pieces of spinal cord had been dried from four- 
teen days to one day ; and inoculations on trephined rabbits, made 
at the same time, showed that the five oldest specimens were not 
virulent, because they did not induce rabies ; while the five 
subsequently dried ones were all active, their virulence being 
proportionally greater as they were more recent, until the last 
killed in seven days. During the latter days, therefore, the child 
liad received, successively, quantities of rabific matter, the last 
of which was so deadly as to destroy rabbits in seven days and 
