Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/303

Rh with more recent marrows, separated from one another by, say, two days of age, till we come at last to a very recent one, which has been in the flask for only one or two days. The dog is then found to be made proof against rabies. We can inoculate him under the skin, or even, by trepanning, under the surface of the brain, without the disease showing itself.

By the application of this method I had succeeded in getting fifty dogs, of various ages and races, proof against rabies without having had a single failure, when, on the 6th of July last, three persons from Alsace unexpectedly presented themselves at my laboratory: Theodore Vone, a grocer of Meissengott, near Schelstadt, who had been bitten in the arm on the 4th of July by his own dog, become mad; Joseph Meister, nine years of age, who had been bitten by the same dog at eight o'clock in the morning of the same day, and who, thrown to the ground by the dog, bore the marks of numerous bites on his hand, legs, and thighs, some of them so deep as to make walking hard for him. The more serious wounds had been cauterized only twelve hours after the accident, or at eight o'clock in the evening of the same day, with phenic acid, by Dr. Weber, of Villé; the third person, who had not been bitten, was the mother of Joseph Meister.

At the autopsy of the dog, which had been killed by its master, we found its stomach filled with hay, straw, and pieces of wood. It was certainly mad. Joseph Meister had been picked up from under it covered with froth and blood. M, Vone had marked bruises on his arms, but he assured me that the dog's teeth had not gone through his shirt. As he had nothing to fear, I told him he might go back to Alsace the same day, and he did so; but I kept little Meister and his mother.

The weekly meeting of the Academy of Sciences took place on the 6th of July. I saw our associate, Dr. Vulpian, there, and told him what had passed. lie and Dr. Grancher, professor in the École de MédecineMédicine [sic], had the kindness to come and see little Joseph Meister at once, and ascertain his condition and the number of his wounds, of which there were no less than fourteen. The opinion of these two physicians was that, in consequence of the severity and number of the bites upon him, Joseph Meister was almost certain to have hydrophobia. I then informed them of the new results which I had obtained in the study of rabies since the address I had delivered at Copenhagen a year previously. The death of this child seeming inevitable, I decided, not without considerable and deep anxiety, as you may imagine, to try upon him the method with which I had had constant success on dogs.

It is true that my fifty dogs had not been bitten before I found them to have been made proof against rabies. But I felt that I might dismiss all anxiety on this point, because I had already obtained a similar condition on a large number of dogs after they had been bitten.