Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1886 — Pasteur’s Method. [ARTICLE]

Pasteur’s Method.

If & section of -due spinal cord of a rabid dog be inserted into the brain of a rabbit by trephining the latter animal becomes mad in about fifteen days; and when the virus from this rabbit is transn-itteekto a second, and from a second to a third, and so on, by the same method of inoculation, the rabies soon becomes more and more pronounced, and the developing or incubation period becomes shorter and shorter, until at the end of fifty inoculations a most severe form of madness results in about seven days. The virus from the last rabbits is of great purity and of invariable strength, so that similar sections of spinal cord may therefore be relied upon to produce exactly similar effects. It has been further shown that the virulence of the pieces of cord slowly and quite regularly disappears when kept in dry air, and remains unaltered when preserved in carbonic acid gas. An understanding of these principles makes it possible to have constantly on hand hydrophobic poison varying in strength from harmless mildness to deadliest virulence. It is upon these graduated poisons that Pasteur depends for his remarkable method of protracting animal system from hydrophobia. Experimenting first with dogs, a little meat broth containing weak virus was injected under the skin the first day, and was foliow r ed daily by injections of increasing virulence —that is, preparations from cord of shorter exposure to air—until in a few days the fresh or strongest virus was used, when it was demonstrated that without injury the animals had become entirely refractory to rabies from bites—even when inflicted before treatment—or inocculations of any degree. The method was first tried on a human subject in July, 1885, when immunity was conferred within ten days on a boy considered to be in great danger. Since then several hundred bitten persons have been treated, and thus far the only failure to prevent hydrophobia has been in a single case where the inocculations were attempted too late.