“I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that's okay— the bat had to get Ozzy shots.”
Ozzy Osbourne, rock vocalist
Since antiquity, rabies had been feared as a death sentence. In 1884 Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) injected material from rabid dogs into rabbits, removing their spinal cords after they had died of the disease. When the cords were suspended over a vapor of potassium hydroxide, Pasteur found the more the cords dried, the fewer infectious agents survived.
He made a series of graduated vaccines, the strongest comprising spinal cord dried for just one day, and the weakest, cord dried for fourteen days. The vaccine was tested in forty-two dogs, twenty-three of whom received fourteen injections (starting with the weakest vaccine, and ending with the strongest), while nineteen received no treatment. At the end of the experiment, all the dogs were exposed to rabies; none of the immunized dogs got the disease, while thirteen of the control group did. Pasteur's vaccine was tested in 1885 when a woman from Alsace turned up at his laboratory with her nine-year-old son who had been bitten by a rabid dog two days earlier. Pasteur ordered a fourteen-day course of increasingly virulent injections, and the boy stayed well.
In 1915 a ten-year study confirmed that, of 6,000 people bitten by a confirmed rabid animal, only 0.6 percent of those who had received the vaccine died, compared to 16 percent of those who had not.
