918-451-0270, Terry DashnerI think you will benefit from this story told by author Robert Hastings. Dr. Hastings is a native of Illinois and has written many books with stories which are as good as, or better than, this one. Enjoy.
Although Robert Koch proved to
world that diseases are transmitted by microbes or germs invisible to human eye, it was French chemist Louis Pasteur who discovered how to use weakened microbes to inoculate against all kinds of infectious diseases.
His first successes were with anthrax and chicken cholera. Next he turned to a search for deadly virus of hydrophobia. But before he could develop a serum of weakened hydrophobia microbes, he must first find and isolate killer virus.
To do this, it was necessary for Pasteur to experiment with dogs that were mad with rabies. In lab he would stick his beard within inches of their fangs so as to suck froth into glass tubes. Using these specimens, obtained at such risk of life, he hunted microbe of hydrophobia.
And succeed he did. But serum had to be proven. The first subject was a nine-year-old boy by name of Joseph Meister from Alsace. His mother came crying to Pasteur’s laboratory, leading her pitiful, whimpering, scared child, hardly able to walk from fourteen gashes inflicted by a mad dog. ‘Save my little boy,’ she begged. It was night of July 6, 1885, when Joseph became first recipient of weakened microbes of hydrophobia in human history. After fourteen inoculations, boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of dreadful disease.
