Joseph Meister

Joseph Meister was the nine-year-old boy who received the first rabies vaccination in July 1885, and he spent much of his later life as a gatekeeper at the Pasteur Institute. He had been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog in Alsace, and his mother brought him to Paris because there was nothing else to do; rabies once symptomatic was invariably fatal and remains so. Louis Pasteur was not a physician and had no licence to treat patients, and his attenuated vaccine had been tried only on dogs. He consulted two medical colleagues, who examined the boy and told him the child would certainly die otherwise, and then administered thirteen injections of progressively more virulent material over ten days. Meister lived. A second case followed, a shepherd boy named Jean-Baptiste Jupille who had been bitten defending other children, and within a year hundreds were coming to Paris from across Europe and from as far as the United States and Russia. The subscription raised to handle them founded the Pasteur Institute in 1888. Meister worked there as a caretaker and concierge for most of his adult life and looked after Pasteur's crypt in the building. He killed himself in June 1940, days after the Germans entered Paris. The story that he did so rather than open the crypt to German soldiers is repeated everywhere and is not supported by the institute's own records, which indicate he had just learned that his wife and daughters, evacuated ahead of the advance, were thought lost; they were in fact alive and returned.

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