Louis Pasteur by Nicola Kingsley - National STEM Centre

The Pasteur
Institute
40
The news of this failure spread as fast as the previous news
of success. The newspapers no longer called Pasteur a life
saver; now he was a murderer. A fierce argument followed.
Some political and medical journals set up a campaign
against Pasteur, and the anti-vivisectionists joined in.
Pasteur and his assistants were worked off their feet
running a clinic for the people who were still arriving in
large numbers for treatment. In the 15months after Joseph
Meister was treated, 2,490people received the vaccine. At
the same time Pasteur had to respond to the critics and
their accusations. He pointed to the statistics-out of 350
people treated, only 1 had died. By July he reported only 10
failures out of the 1,726 French people treated. The
expected death-rate from bites by rabid dogs was 16 out of
every 100 people bitten. Still his opponents were not
satisfied. They argued that most people who were bitten
never developed rabies anyway, and that Pasteur's
treatment involved the risk of giving rabies to people who
might never have got it at all. They accused him of not
giving the treatment an adequate trial before using it on
people. To make matters worse, there was no other
laboratory in Europe equipped to repeat Pasteur's
experiments and judge how well they worked.