Louis Pasteur's Revolutionary Rabies Vaccine and the Birth of Modern Immunization

In 1885, a 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was bitten by a rabid dog 14 times. His mother took him to Paris to see Louis Pasteur, who was working on a rabies vaccine. Pasteur had previously isolated the cause of other diseases, but the rabies virus was invisible under the microscopes of the time. He and his collaborator Emile Roux tested an inoculation method by injecting part of a rabid dog's brain into another dog's brain, but the inoculated dog died. Despite the setback, Pasteur continued his work and eventually developed a vaccine for rabies, which was first administered to Meister on July 6, 1885. The vaccine was a groundbreaking achievement in the field of immunization and marked the beginning of the modern era of immunization.