Pasteur’s Method of Treating Hydrophobia (Rabies)
On December 15, 2023, I announced that I had begun the early stages of writing a book—something I had always dreamed of doing. With the wealth of material from both of my sites, I could have easily reformatted my existing work into one
However, I wasn’t content with simply repackaging old articles. If I was going to write a book, I wanted to dig deeper, presenting not just my previous research but also new evidence and fresh insights.
What began as a short introductory booklet exposing the fraud of virology has since evolved into something much larger. To do this right, I felt it was necessary to trace the origins of the germ “theory” of disease and explore how it laid the foundation for virology as a subsidiary field.
As such, I have been conducting a more nuanced and detailed examination of Louis Pasteur’s work. Some of this research made its way into my article The Germ Hypothesis Part 1: Pasteur’s Problems, where I analyzed his experiments on chicken cholera, anthrax, and rabies.
As I expanded on these areas for the book, I developed an even greater appreciation for just how fraudulent and deceptive his research truly was—especially regarding rabies.
While I have written about rabies in the past—specifically about it being a “virus” of fear—it always seems that there is more underneath the surface left to discover. In fact, there is enough material on rabies alone to fill an entire book, making it particularly challenging to condense everything into just a portion of a chapter on Pasteur.
Fortunately, while researching this section, I came across what I consider to be one of the most concise and damning critiques of Pasteur’s rabies experiments. This critique was presented before the Philadelphia Medical Society by Dr. Charles Winslow Dulles on January 13, 1886.
The introduction by the Victoria Street Society, united with the International Association for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, described Dr. Dulles’ analysis as the most effective criticism of Pasteur’s hydrophobia treatment they had ever encountered.
They noted that Pasteur’s own explanations were “lacking in the essential elements of cohesion, consistency, and clearness.”
INTRODUCTION
THE following important paper forms by far the most effective criticism which we have yet seen on the Pasteurian theory of inoculation for hydrophobia.
It is from the pen of an American medical man, who has evidently read the whole series of M. Pasteur’s expositions of his system in the original Bulletins, and it will be seen that the result of this careful professional examination is to show that the explanations even from Pasteur’s own mouth are lacking in the essential elements of cohesion, consistency, and clearness.
The paper of Dr. Dulles was originally read before the Philadelphia Medical Society, on the 13th of January last.
As I also find this paper to be a highly effective critique of Pasteur’s research, I am presenting it here in its entirety. However, to further clarify key points made by Dr. Dulles, I have included additional commentary and supporting evidence throughout.
Hopefully, by the end, Pasteur’s fear-based fraud will be even clearer for all to see.
When Dr. Charles Winslow Dulles gave his presentation Pasteur’s Method of Treating Hydrophobia to the Philadelphia Medical Society, he began by presenting a resume of Pasteur’s rabies communications up to that point.
The paper, however, begins by presenting his critique of Pasteur’s seventh communication on rabies from October 1885, one of his last on the subject. According to leading Pasteur historian Gerald Geison’s book The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, up to that point, Pasteur had provided only “brief and tantalizingly vague” (Geison, 189) accounts of his rabies research.
However, his October 1885 address before the Académie des Sciences was an immediate sensation that has since been enshrined in legend (Geison, 193).
In this communication, as Dr. Dulles pointed out, Pasteur immediately admitted that his previous vaccination method described in prior communications rendered only 15 or 16 out of 20 dogs “refractory” to rabies.
He also acknowledged that determining refractoriness—i.e., “immunity”—required no less than three or four months, significantly limiting the number of experiments he could conduct. Dissatisfied with these results, Pasteur devised an alternative approach.
This new method involved trephination—removing a circular piece of bone from the skull—and injecting spinal cord material from a rabid dog directly into a rabbit’s brain.
Once the rabbit succumbed, its spinal cord was harvested and injected into another rabbit in the same manner, with the process repeated multiple times. Eventually, the spinal cord from the final rabbit was removed and left to dry—a procedure Pasteur claimed reduced its “virulence.”
Once aged, a small piece of the dried spinal cord was dissolved in sterilized veal broth and injected subcutaneously into a dog using a Pravaz syringe. Dr. Dulles noted that the criteria for determining the optimal aging of the spinal cord were known only to Pasteur and his collaborators.
This was the method utilized to create the treatment purportedly used on Joseph Meister, the 9-year-old boy Pasteur famously claimed in this address to have saved from a fatal case of rabies after multiple dog bites.
However, as Dr. Dulles highlighted, Meister’s wounds had already been cauterized—the primary “cure” for rabies at the time—and the dog was diagnosed as rabid based solely on an autopsy finding that its stomach contained hay, straw, and bits of wood.
Pasteur’s Method of Treating Hydrophobia
DR. DULLES first gave a resumé of Pasteur’s communications. We give the last part of the discourse. Dr. Dulles said:- “Pasteur’s seventh and last communication on this subject is boldly entitled, “Methode pour prévenir la rage après morsure” (Bull. de l’Acad. de Méd., October 27, 1885, pp. 1431-39).
In this, after a complacent announcement of the value of his earlier discoveries, he confesses that his previous method would only render refractory to rabies fifteen or sixteen out of twenty dogs.
To ascertain the fact of refractoriness requires not less than three or four months, he says, which restricts very much the application of the method-and, I may add, indicates how few experiments he could have carried out to their conclusions.
He had, therefore, attempted to discover a method which he could dare to call perfect. “After experiments, so to speak, innumerable, I have,” he says, “discovered a preventative method, which is practical and prompt, the successful applications of which to dogs are already numerous enough and sure enough for me to have confidence in its general applicability to all animals and to man himself” (loc. cit., p. 1432).
This method may be summarised as follows:- An attenuated virus is obtained by inoculating a rabbit, by trephining, with rabic spinal cord of a dog dying of ordinary rabies (rage des rues), and then a second rabbit with the spinal cord of the first and so on in series.
After a very long series it is found that a “virus” is obtained which kills rabbits in seven days. When this point is reached, pieces of the spinal cord of one of the victims are removed with precautions of purity as great as it is possible to secure, and suspended in small flasks in which the air is kept dry by a piece of caustic potash. With each day that it is kept such a piece of spinal cord becomes less virulent.
The treatment consists in taking a small piece of one of these cords and “dissolving” (délayer) it in sterilised veal broth, and injecting a Pravaz syringeful under the skin of the dog.
The age of the cord used must be such that it does not endanger the life of the subject of the experiment. How to ascertain the proper age Pasteur says he knows from experience; but unfortunately he forgets to say how anyone else may decide the matter (loc. cit., p. 1433).
The effect of this treatment Pasteur, when he made his report, had tried on one human being, the now famous Joseph Meister, nine years old, bitten July 4th by a dog supposed to be mad. His bites were numerous.
The principal ones had been cauterised the same day with carbolic acid. At an autopsy the dog’s stomach was found to contain hay, straw, and bits of wood; and on this fact alone the diagnosis of rabies in the dog rests to this day.
Pasteur called Dr. Vulpian and Dr. Grancher to see the boy, and they said he was most inevitably exposed to contract hydrophobia, on account of the severity and the number of his bites.
Interestingly, Pasteur relied on Drs. Alfred Vulpian and Emile Granger to examine and treat the young Meister rather than his most trusted collaborator, Emile Roux. This was because Roux had a “clear appreciation of just how boldly, even recklessly, Pasteur was willing to apply vaccines in the face of ambiguous experimental evidence about their safety or efficacy” (Geison, 237).
While working on the rabies vaccine, tensions between the two nearly led to a permanent rupture. Their disagreement centered on how much reliable evidence should be gathered through animal experimentation before it became ethical to proceed with human trials.
Unlike Pasteur, Roux was a qualified medical doctor, fully licensed to practice medicine. He could have administered the so-called “life-saving” injections to Joseph Meister, yet he was noticeably absent from the entire ordeal (Geison, 238)
Geison suggested that Roux’s absence was likely due to his belief that Pasteur’s treatment of Meister constituted unjustified human experimentation (Geison, 238).
As someone intimately familiar with the extent of both the animal and human experimentation conducted—as well as its success, or lack thereof—Roux clearly deemed the evidence insufficient to justify treating the young boy (Geison, 238–239). As such, he reportedly refused to sign the work on the rabies vaccine.
Meister received a half-syringeful of fifteen-day-old spinal cord, followed by twelve additional injections over the next ten days, with increasingly fresh and supposedly more “virulent” materials.
Because he did not succumb to the disease—even after receiving materials purportedly more “virulent” than the bite of a rabid street dog—the boy was considered “cured.” Pasteur’s notebooks revealed that the last three “virulent” inoculations were not necessary to “cure” young Meister.
In a highly unethical move, he had them performed in order to test the “effectiveness” of his method by deliberately attempting to “infect” (i.e. poison) the child with the rabies “virus” to demonstrate that the vaccine prevented further “infection.”
Dr. Dulles noted that Pasteur’s evidence was inadequate. There was no proof that the dog that had bitten the young Meister was ever rabid, and since his wounds had already been cauterized, there was no reason to assume that the boy would have succumbed to the disease.
Even if he had been in danger of becoming ill, Dr. Dulles argued that it was far too early for Pasteur to claim success.
“The death of this child appearing inevitable,” Pasteur then decided, “not without keen and cruel solicitude,” to try his new method on him. He inoculated the boy with a half syringeful of spinal cord (he says, meaning no doubt diluted or délayé) fifteen days old.
He made in all twelve hypodermic injections in ten days, each day using a fresher cord, and then sent the boy home cured, having “escaped not only the hydrophobia which his bites might have developed, but that with which I had inoculated him, to test the immunity due to the treatment, a hydrophobia more virulent than that of street dogs” (loc. cit., p. 1436).
In commenting upon this communication there are two sets of objections raised. One relates to the case of the boy Joseph Meister, which has attracted such attention the whole world over. The other relates to the general statements made, regarded from a scientific standpoint.
In regard to the case of the boy, it may be briefly stated:-First, because there is no proof that the dog that bit him was mad (everybody ought to know that the contents of a dog’s stomach are of no value as evidence of rabies), and because the boy’s wounds had been cauterised, there is not reason to assume that he was in danger of having hydrophobia; and, secondly, if he was, it is by far too soon to say he is free from danger.
Dr. Dulles noted that Dr. Jules Guérin, a French physician and surgeon known for his work in orthopedics and anatomy, immediately opposed Pasteur’s evidence, although his protest was ignored by the President of the Académie de Médecine.
While Pasteur boasted of having conducted innumerable experiments, he never provided exact numbers or detailed accounts. According to Dr. Dulles’ calculations, for Pasteur to have performed uninterrupted chains of successful experiments, he would have needed approximately 130 to 140 rabbits and a continuous period of two and a half to nearly three years without any interruptions or failures.
Dr. Dulles questioned the plausibility of such an experimental record and the trustworthiness of Pasteur’s claims. Moreover, he pointed out that in the only detailed account of these experiments, Pasteur had admitted that half of the spinal cords used in the critical experiment on Joseph Meister showed no evidence of “virus” when tested on rabbits.
Out of eleven spinal cords, five were found to be without the “virus,” five were deemed “virulent,” and Pasteur provided no information about the final one.
Dr. Dulles discussed the inconsistencies and contradictions in Pasteur’s statements over time, remarking that “they are so inconsistent that the cordial acceptance of almost any one of them seems to demand that the preceding ones should be banished from our memory.”
He highlighted several of these inconsistencies, culminating in Pasteur’s claim that the protective character of his “virus” depended on a reduction in quantity rather than a reduction in its “virulence.”
This directly contradicted his earlier statements regarding his chicken cholera vaccine. Dr. Dulles questioned how Pasteur could reconcile a method that used reduced quantities of “virus”—which initially appeared to cause severe disease—with later claims that the same method was now “protective.”
In doing so, he suggested that there were significant flaws in Pasteur’s experimental design and interpretation of the data.
When we come to compare the assertions in this communication with the evidence in support of them, we do not wonder that the prudent Jules Guérin begged the unwilling President to let him utter a word of protest before this announcement should go out to the world with the sanction of the Académie de Médecine.
As usual, Pasteur, in this communication, speaks of his last experiment as “always” successful (loc. cit., p. 1432). Again, his experiments have been “innumerable, so to speak.” Unfortunately, here as elsewhere (with one exception), the actual number is not named, and his vague statement will bear analysing.
The conclusions at which he has arrived could only properly rest on a number of uninterrupted series of experiments, each complete and successful from beginning to end.
Now, I have taken the trouble to figure out what a single series would involve, and I find it means no interruption and no failure in experiments requiring one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty rabbits, and a period of from about two and a half to nearly three years!
An interruption anywhere would break up a whole series. Now-supposing no interruption occurred-how many such series could Pasteur have been carrying on during the three years since, he says (loc. cit., p. 1432), he began them?
Again, what seems to me the most fatal objection to the idea that Pasteur’s experiments could possibly have been trustworthy throughout these immense series is the fact that, by his own admission, a full half of the spinal cords, used in the crucial experiment on Joseph Meister, which gave him such “cruel inquietudes”-as well it might-proved to have no virus when tested on rabbits!
Out of eleven, he says, five were without virus, five were virulent; and of one, singularly enough, he says nothing (loc. cit., p. 1436).
If this could happen in the only detailed experiment which Pasteur has ever recorded, and when everything seemed to depend upon the infallibility which Pasteur has so often claimed, what are we to think of the experiments done in the secrecy of his laboratory, of which no record has ever been given, and of which not a single witness has ever spoken except Pasteur?
Another matter to be remarked just here is that until now Pasteur had given no hint that the virus of hydrophobia could be attenuated so simply as by dessicating the spinal cord.
And yet, if his own statements are true, he must have been far advanced in his experience with this method at the very time when he was startling the world with his backward and forward modifications of the virus in monkeys and rabbits, and presenting this as the way to obtain the virus for what he called his three little inoculations.
If we take the trouble to place side by side Pasteur’s statements at different times, we see that they are so inconsistent that the cordial acceptance of almost any one of them seems to demand that the preceding ones should be banished from our memory.
At first it was in the brain that the virus was to be obtained in perfect purity; then trephining and intradural inoculation was the sovereign method; then intravenous inoculations were said to simplify the matter; then blood was a good virus; then smaller quantities produced fiercer rabies; then inoculations in series modified the virus after many variations; then a few monkeys and rabbits did the work; then rabbits alone sufficed, while the virus was weakened by drying the cord.
And, to crown all, forgetting the traditions of his own work in regard to charbon and chicken cholera, Pasteur says that the protective character of his virus depends upon a reduction in quantity and not in the virulence of the virus (loc. cit., p. 1437).
What! And when we catch our breath, we cannot but recall what has gone before, and say: If the hypodermic injection of reduced quantities of virus was the means Pasteur found would most readily produce the most furious form of rabies, in February, 1884, when he must have been half-way through the series of experiments upon which the present communication rests, how could the remaining half have sufficed to show that the same way of proceeding would exert a kind and protective influence on the same animals and on men?
It’s worth noting that while Pasteur believed he was working with the causative agent of rabies, he openly admitted that he was never able to isolate one. As French physician and Pasteur biographer Patrice Debré wrote in his book Louis Pasteur, Pasteur repeatedly tried in vain to cultivate a rabies microbe for isolation.
Realizing that this was impossible, he became obsessed with finding a way to halt the march of his “invisible enemy.” Debré even praised Pasteur for being “able to hold on to his conceptions in the face of an exception that invalidated them” (Debré, 415).
Because Pasteur expected to find a “virus”—which referred to a poison or miasma at the time—Debré noted that he simply “divined the virus,” never questioning its existence despite its invisibility (Debré 414).
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com
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