In 1885, nine year old Joseph Meister was mauled by a rabid dog, which at the time meant near certain death once symptoms such as hydrophobia appeared. Louis Pasteur had developed a treatment from rabbit spinal cords infected with rabies and dried for days to weaken the virus, and it had worked in dogs. But Pasteur was a chemist, not a licensed physician, and a death could have brought charges. He consulted physicians Alfred Vulpian and Jacques-Joseph Grancher, who agreed the boy needed intervention and that the treatment was the only option. Over 11 days Meister received a series of injections, each less weakened than the last, and he never developed rabies.

Authorities chose not to pursue Pasteur, and Meister spent his working life as a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. German troops occupied the city on June 14, 1940, and on June 24 Meister, 64, took his own life. A long-repeated story says he did it rather than open Pasteur’s crypt to German soldiers. A 1940 veterinary journal and his granddaughter’s testimony tell a different account: he had sent his family away, lost contact, and came to believe they had been captured. They returned safely hours after his death.

• How drying infected nerve tissue attenuated the virus while still training the immune system
• The legal line Pasteur crossed by treating a patient without a medical license
• Meister’s decades guarding the institute built in part on his recovery
• Child actor Dickie Moore playing him in the 1936 film The Story of Louis Pasteur
• His story in the 1974 BBC series Microbes and Men and in Dark Matters: Twisted but True