Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/304

292 Thus, on the 6th of July, at eight o'clock in the evening, sixty hours after he had been bitten on the 4th, in the presence of Drs. Vulpian and Grancher, we inoculated under a crease made in the skin of the hypochondrium of little Meister a half-syringe Pravaz of marrow of a rabbit that had died of rabies on the 21st of June, which had been kept since that time, or for fifteen days, in a flask of dry air.

New inoculations were made, always in the hypochrondres, under conditions of which a table is here given:

I thus made the number of inoculations thirteen, and the number of days of treatment ten, I would say, furthermore, that a smaller number of inoculations would have been sufficient. But it is easily conceivable that in this first trial I should have acted with particular caution.

We also inoculated, by trepanning, two new rabbits with each of the several marrows employed, in order to test their states of virulence. The observations on these rabbits permit me to assert that the marrows used on the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th of July were not virulent, for they did not make the rabbits mad. Those of the 11th, 12th, 14th, 15th, and 16th of July were all virulent, in proportion as the marrow was fresher. Rabies declared itself after seven days of incubation in the rabbits of the 15th and 16th of July; after eight days in those of the 12th and 14th; and after fifteen days in those of the 11th of July.

I had thus in the last days inoculated Joseph Meister with the most virulent virus, that of the dog strengthened by several passages from rabbits to rabbits; it was a virus that gave rabies after seven days of incubation to these animals, after eight or ten days to dogs. I was justified in venturing on this experiment by what had taken place with the fifty dogs of which I have spoken. When the state of immunity is reached, we can, without inconvenience, inoculate with the most virulent virus, and in any quantity; and it has seemed to me that this had no other effect than further to confirm the condition of refractoriness against rabies.