Development of the Rabies Vaccine

In 1885 Louis Pasteur and his collaborator Emile Roux produced the first vaccine against rabies, made from the dried spinal cords of infected rabbits. On July 6 of that year a nine year old boy named Joseph Meister, who had been badly bitten by a rabid dog, became the first person to receive the treatment, given as a single injection followed by twelve further doses over ten days. Before this the disease was almost always fatal once symptoms appeared, and the vaccine's evident success spread rapidly, reaching the United States within a year and leading to the founding of the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1888.