On Jul. 6, 1885, Louis Pasteur’s anti-rabies vaccine was successfully tested  on nine-year old Joseph Meister who had been bitten numerous times by an infected dog. The boy did not contract the disease.

His mother, Marie-Angélique, had heard of Pasteur who was vaccinating rabid dogs. She went to Paris and begged him to save her son.

Pasteur’s colleague Emile Roux had been working with a killed vaccine derived from the spinal cords of infected rabbits. The vaccine had been tested only on dogs before its first human trial.

When Joseph arrived, it was clear that he would die if nothing was done. At the time, rabies was a fatal disease for which there was no cure. However, Louis Pasteur’s collaborators (among them Roux) did not want to administer the rabies vaccine.

A doctor by the name of Jacques Joseph Grancher convinced Louis Pasteur to attempt the impossible and let him administer the treatment to the boy from Alsace. Every day for ten days, Dr. Grancher administered 12 doses of the vaccine. Less than a month later, the outcome was clear: Joseph Meister had been saved!