A VACCINE FOR RABIES:  Working toward a rabies vaccine, Louis Pasteur and his collaborator Emile Roux had learned to grow the virus in rabbits and then weaken it by drying out the infected nerve tissue.  They had tried the vaccine that resulted from this novel approach on dogs, and it seemed safe.  But at the time 9-year-old Joseph Meister was mauled by a mad dog, it hadn’t yet been tried on human beings.

On this day in 1885, young Meister became the first to be treated with the vaccine (actually a series of vaccines).  He survived.

(Meister went on to be caretaker at the Pasteur Institute.  His story, however, ends sadly.  In 1940, days after the Nazis marched into Paris, he urged his family to flee Paris, but refused to leave his post at the Institute.  Somehow he got it into his head—falsely—that his family had been captured and killed.  He therefore killed himself.  They returned to find him dead.)