119. Pasteur, Louis. Autograph letter signed (“L. Pasteur”), 1 page (5 x 7.75 in.; 127 x 197 mm.), in French, Paris, 24 October 1882, written to “Dear Sir”. Toning on borders from previous display; light chipping on right margin; minor paper loss on top expertly infilled.

Louis Pasteur orders two copies of a study on rabies – the subject for his immunological studies.

Pasteur writes in full: Dear Sir, Would you please be good enough to send to my laboratory at 45 Ulm Street two copies of La Rage [Rabies] by Mr. Varmenois (?) against reimbursement.
With great compliments L. Pasteur

French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur taught at Dijon, at Strasbourg (where he married Marie Laurent, daughter of the university rector), and was Professor of Chemistry at Lille before he became Director of Scientific Studies at École Normale in Paris (1857-63). In 1857, he began to study why fermentation in wine vats produced lactic acid which caused the wine to go sour. He proved conclusively that this fermentation was caused by bacteria in the air - his discovery verifying the “germ theory” of disease (and destroying the old idea of spontaneous generation). In 1865, Pasteur discovered (and found a way to cure) a disease, which attacked silk worms, and, in 1870, he devised the process known as “pasteurization” for killing bacteria in milk. He also developed vaccines against the cattle disease anthrax (1877; extending his discoveries to hydrophobia in man, or rabies in dogs), and chicken cholera (1880). Elected to the Académie Française (1882). The first Pasteur Institute was founded in his honor (1885).

It is not clearly understood why Pasteur selected rabies as a subject for his immunological studies. The disease was of rather minor importance, claiming in France only a few hundred deaths each year. Perhaps Pasteur was attracted to the study of rabies due to his vivid childhood memories of a mad wolf charging through the Jura, biting some people on the hands and head - all of them succumbing to hydrophobia, some of them with horrible suffering. As it turned out, the subject of rabies was a good choice, for it made microbiological science an established religion - and made a saint out of its creator, Pasteur. As early as October of 1886, 15 months after the first application of his rabies treatment to young Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old boy bitten on the hands, legs and thighs by a rabid dog (6 July 1885), Pasteur could report that there had been only 10 failures out of 1,726 bitten persons of French nationality who had been subjected to treatment by inoculation. Very quickly, his method of inoculation was to become an established practice.
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