Joseph Master

Joseph Meister in 1885

Joseph Jean Baptiste Meister (born February 21, 1876 in Paris ; † June 24, 1940 there ) was the first person to be fully vaccinated against rabies .

Family origin

The Meister family came from the Sundgau on their father's side . His father Joseph Antoine met Marie-Angélique Sonnefraud, who was born in Steige in Alsace, in Paris, where both of them - like so many Alsatians in the 19th century - had moved. They married on April 25, 1870. Since their homeland had been annexed by the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War , they initially stayed in the capital, where they lived in the 18th arrondissement . Joseph Antoine Meister worked as a baker, his wife as a trimmers . Their first four children were born in Paris, first three daughters, then Joseph Meister as their first son. In 1877 the family moved to mother Steige's home village, which was now under German rule. In the place near the Franco-German border, however, French was still spoken. Joseph Meister's father opened a bakery there.

July 4, 1885

There are two versions of the events presented below: The version circulated by Louis Pasteur and then embellished by his biographer René Valléry-Radot, but based on second-hand information, has become the basis of the traditional representation in the history books. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary, the local historian André Dubail discovered that Joseph Meister had left his own memories, which differ in many details. They are the basis here, variants of the traditional version can be found in the footnotes.

On the morning of July 4, 1885, the baker Joseph Antoine Meister woke his eldest son at around 5 a.m. to fetch liquid yeast from a brewery in the neighboring town of Meisengott (now French: Maisonsgoutte ) . Near the center of the village, the nine-year-old was attacked by a hunting dog, which bit him in the right hand and, after the boy fell, in the leg. A locksmith had seen the scene and chased the dog away with an iron bar. Later, the owner Théodore Vonné joined the group, who managed to grab the dog by the collar and lock it in a garage, but not without being bitten himself. The child's wounds were washed at the village well, one of the dog owner's daughters mended his torn clothes, Vonné himself gave him a mark as reparation . However, nobody brought home the badly injured Joseph Meister, who had to constantly sit down on the way back to rest.

According to Meister and a newspaper article, the dog is said to have attacked other people and animals, but at least nothing of the kind has been reported. Théodore Vonné apparently hesitated to immediately kill his valuable hunting dog, but tried to take him to a veterinarian in Schlettstadt, 25 km away . On the way, the animal tried to bite other people, so that it was killed by gendarmes. Vonné took the carcass to the veterinarian, who found hay, straw and splinters of wood in the dog's stomach during a necropsy , which at the time was considered a sure sign of rabies.

Joseph's parents took their son to the nearest doctor, Eugène Weber, who practiced in Weiler , who rinsed the wounds with carbolic acid ( phenol ) around eight o'clock in the evening . While Vonné was waiting for the carriage in Schlettstadt, he visited a café where he told about the events. Three gentlemen remembered reading in a newspaper about a Paris chemist named Pasteur who had achieved good results with a rabies vaccination in animal experiments. After his return, Vonné went to see his parents and told them about the veterinarian's diagnosis and the scientist in Paris. They decided to go to Paris that evening. On July 5th, a Sunday, Joseph's mother set out with her son and Théodore Vonné on the long journey, they crossed the border to France and took a train in Saint-Dié to Nancy , then to Paris. There one did not want to give travelers in several hospitals the address of Pasteur, who was controversial in medical circles, until Madame Meister finally prevailed. They learned that Pasteur was working at the École normal supérieure on rue d'Ulm.

The status of rabies vaccination

Louis Pasteur had developed a rabies vaccination procedure that worked in animal experiments on dogs and had been examined by a commission of inquiry. Daily newspapers reported about it. It was unknown at the time that he had already tried his procedure on two people, but had to stop the treatment for different reasons. These first attempts at treatment were first discovered in Pasteur's laboratory diaries by the American science historian Gerald L. Geison . Pasteur then changed his vaccine production process, but had not yet adequately tested the modified process in animal experiments. This may be the reason why, on June 12, 1885, he refused the treatment of two people that had been proposed to him in writing. On July 6th, he was faced with two bitten people. In the case of Théodore Vonné, it quickly became clear that the bite had not penetrated the shirt and had therefore not caused a wound. Pasteur sent him home. Joseph Meister, on the other hand, had been wounded several times by the dog in his right arm and legs.

A clear diagnosis of rabies in dogs could only have been made by transferring tissue to rabbits, a technique that at that time was only mastered in Pasteur's laboratory. However, the dog's carcass was not available. The autopsy results were considered to be a sure sign that the animal was indeed rabid; According to Pasteur, however, only about every tenth person bitten by a rabid animal is actually infected. So there was a 90 percent chance that Joseph Meister would have survived without treatment; only in the case of an infection would he have expected death, albeit certain.

The treatment

Jean-Baptiste Jupille is the second person to be vaccinated against rabies in a contemporary depiction. Since Pasteur was not a doctor, he watches from the background.

Pasteur decided to try treatment. As a chemist, he was not authorized to treat people. He brought two doctor friends, Edmé Félix Alfred Vulpian and Jacques-Joseph Grancher , who confirmed his diagnosis , from a meeting of the Academy of Sciences that was in progress . Two doctors - Vulpian and, apparently, Pasteur's own associate, Roux - refused to perform the treatment. The vaccine was then injected by Grancher. Since Pasteur had no hospital beds available, he had mother and son Meister make two beds in a laboratory building on Rue Vauquelin.

In a frequently reproduced picture by Albert Edelfelt , Louis Pasteur looks at a bottle in which the dried spinal cord of a rabbit hangs on a thread over a drying agent.

The treatment regimen required repeated injections of emulsions from the dried spinal cord of rabbits. The longer the spinal cord dried, the less virulent the viruses in this live vaccine were . On the evening of July 6th - sixty hours after the suspected infection - Joseph Meister was injected with half a Pravaz syringe containing the emulsion of a spinal cord from a rabbit that had died of rabies sixteen days earlier. In the following days up to July 16, the boy was given a total of 13 syringes with increasingly fresher spinal cord. In transfer experiments to rabbits, the vaccine from the first seven vaccinations was found to be non-virulent, the later vaccine doses were increasingly virulent. The rabbits that had received the vaccine from the last two injections as a control developed rabies just seven days later.

At the last vaccination - the spinal cord had only dried for a day - Pasteur transmitted fully virulent rabies viruses. The Italian science historian Antonio Cadeddu pointed out a medical-ethical problem in this context : At least the last three vaccinations were no longer motivated by the treatment, but Pasteur used the opportunity to conduct a human test to determine whether the boy was actually immune to rabies as a result of the previous vaccinations had become. In view of the fact that there was a high probability that Joseph Meister had not been infected in the previous accident , this was not morally justified in Cadeddu's judgment. Joseph Meister survived. Louis Pasteur had vaccinated a person completely and successfully against rabies for the first time.

Louis Pasteur announced the treatment of Joseph Meister and the treatment that had begun for a second person - the shepherd Jean-Baptiste Jupille - on October 26th and 27th in front of the Academies of Science and Medicine, causing an international sensation.

Joseph Meister's further life

Joseph Meister remained under the medical control of Grancher in Paris until July 27th, after which he was looked after by the doctor Weber in Alsace. From August 20, Pasteur was certain that the boy would not develop rabies. Pasteur stayed in contact with Joseph Meister in the following years and also supported the family with money when the bakery got into trouble. In the fall of 1890, Joseph Meister, now 14, entered the service of Louis Pasteur, but was so homesick that he returned to Alsace the following year. There he learned the bakery trade from his father. At the age of 20 he did his military service in the German Army . Since his brother Léon took over his father's bakery, he looked for a job in a bakery in Weiler and finally married the owner's daughter, Elise Klein, in 1903. After the death of his father-in-law, he inherited the bakery in 1908. The business was bad and was sold in 1912.

Joseph Meister turned to the Pasteur Institute , where Roux got him the position of caretaker. By moving to Paris, he avoided military service in the German Army during the First World War , which his brother Léon had to do, for example. A total of seven children were born by 1916, four of whom reached adulthood. Two daughters later also entered the service of the Pasteur Institute . During the Second World War , Joseph Meister sent his family to the country. On June 14, 1940 , German troops occupied Paris. Ten days later, Joseph Meister committed suicide. Although it is often claimed that he refused to allow German soldiers access to Pasteur's crypt, the exact circumstances of his death are unclear. Master's wife Elise died on November 10, 1944.

Post fame

Pasteur, who was an ardent patriot, was delighted that the first person to be successfully vaccinated against rabies came from Alsace. For their part, the German authorities undertook a thorough investigation into the case. The vaccination gave rise to the establishment of the Pasteur Institute . In Alsace, a total of eleven newspapers asked for donations, for which Pasteur thanked them in a touched letter. Joseph Meister's suicide in World War II was taken by many French as a sign that Alsace would never become German again. Strangely, the second person to be fully vaccinated against rabies - Jean-Baptiste Jupille - received a statue in the courtyard of the Pasteur Institute, but Joseph Meister did not.

literature

• Antonio Cadeddu: Les vérités de la science. Pratique, récit, histoire: le cas Pasteur . Leo S. Olschki, Florenz 2005, pp. 166-183.
• André Dubail: Joseph Meister le premier être humain sauvé de la rage . In: Annuaire de la Société d'Histoire du Val de Villé . Société d'Histoire du Val de Villé, Villé 1985, pp. 93-148.
• Gerald L. Geison: The Private Science of Louis Pasteur . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995, pp. 234-256.
• Adrien Loir: A l'ombre de Pasteur. Souvenirs personnels . Le mouvement sanitaire, Paris 1938, pp. 73-79.
• René Vallery-Radot: La vie de Pasteur . 2 volumes. Paris, Flammarion 1900.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Joseph Meister, like his first three siblings, was clearly born in Paris. The location information Steige, which is almost consistently widespread on the Internet, is incorrect, see André Dubail: Joseph Meister le premier être humain sauvé de la rage . In: Annuaire de la Société d'Histoire du Val de Villé . Société d'Histoire du Val de Villé, Villé 1985, p. 101.
2. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 95.
3. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 100.
4. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 101.
5. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 102.
6. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 106.
7. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister …, p. 104. It is traditionally claimed that Joseph Meister went to school in Meisengott, but in fact he attended the French-speaking school in Steige and was there so early to be back before the start of classes. Pasteur says explicitly that the accident happened at 8 a.m., which is too late because Joseph should have been at school by then.
8. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 107. It is traditionally claimed that the dog owner was the only one to come to the rescue immediately.
9. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 107.
10. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 109.
11. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 110; the newspaper article appeared on July 12, 1885 in the Nouvelles alsaciennes .
12. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 113.
13. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., pp. 110 and 113.
14. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 113.
15. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister …, p. 116. Traditionally, the recommendation to travel to Pasteur in Paris is attributed to the doctor Weber.
16. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 116.
17. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 117.
18. ↑ Report présenté au ministre de l'instruction publique et de beaux-arts par la commission chargée de contrôler les expériences de M. Pasteur sur la prophylaxie de la rage . In: Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.): Œuvres de Pasteur . Volume 6: Maladies virulentes, virus-vaccins et prophylaxie de la rage . Masson, Paris 1933, pp. 753-758. Originally published in Journal officiel de la République française . No. 216, 1884, pp. 4228-4230.
19. ↑ Gerald L. Geison: The Private Science of Louis Pasteur . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995, pp. 195-205.
20. ↑ This question is controversial. Pasteur himself describes his method as having been sufficiently tested on a total of 50 dogs. Most of these experiments, however, still relate to the old method. The experiments on the modified way of vaccine production were still ongoing. In particular, Pasteur always administered the vaccine first and then infected the test animals with rabies, whereas in the treatment of humans, vaccination necessarily follows the infection.
21. ^ Pasteur Vallery-Radot (Ed.): Correspondance de Pasteur . Volume 4: L'Étape des maladies virulentes (suite). Vaccination de l'homme contre la rage. Dernières années 1885–1895 . Flammarion, Paris 1951, pp. 21f.
22. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 122.
23. ^ Louis Pasteur: Causerie . In: Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.): Œuvres de Pasteur . Volume 7: Mélanges scientifiques et littéraires . Masson, Paris 1939, pp. 363–371, here p. 364. In connection with the events of Joseph Meister, this fact was not discussed by Pasteur or from literature to Geison. The events are always presented as if Master had expected certain death without treatment. Pasteur himself writes against his better judgment: "The death of this child seemed inevitable [...]." See: Méthode pour prévenir la rage après morsure . In: Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.): Œuvres de Pasteur . Volume 6: Maladies virulentes, virus-vaccins et prophylaxie de la rage . Masson, Paris 1933, pp. 603–610, here p. 606.
24. ^ Adrien Loir: A l'ombre de Pasteur. Souvenirs personnels . Le mouvement sanitaire, Paris 1938, pp. 73f. Loir was an eyewitness to the events.
25. ↑ Geison: The Private Science of Louis Pasteur ..., pp. 236-238.
26. ↑ Loir: A l'ombre de Pasteur ..., p. 74.
27. ↑ Loir: A l'ombre de Pasteur ..., p. 74.
28. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 126.
29. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 126.
30. ↑ He himself says that the viruses transmitted were more virulent than those from rabid street dogs, see Méthode pour prévenir la rage après morsure . In: Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.): Œuvres de Pasteur . Volume 6: Maladies virulentes, virus-vaccins et prophylaxie de la rage . Masson, Paris 1933, pp. 603–610, here p. 607.
31. ^ Antonio Cadeddu: Les vérités de la science. Pratique, récit, histoire: le cas Pasteur . Leo S. Olschki, Florenz 2005, pp. 169-171.
32. ↑ Méthode pour prévenir la rage après morsure . In: Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.): Œuvres de Pasteur . Volume 6: Maladies virulentes, virus-vaccins et prophylaxie de la rage . Masson, Paris 1933, pp. 603-610. Originally published / published in Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences . Volume 101, 1885, pp. 765-773.
33. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., pp. 129-131.
34. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., pp. 135 and 137.
35. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 143.
36. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 130.
37. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 132.
38. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 134.
39. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 143.
40. ↑ Dubail: Joseph Meister ..., p. 93.