Happy New Year! The Land of Desire is BACK with an exciting – and hopeful – story to set us off on the right track in 2021. Your happy host gets to indulge her love of epidemiology a little bit without leaving you depressed in the middle of a pandemic (she swears). This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine.

Episode 64: “Louis Pasteur and the History of the Vaccine”

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host Diana, and I’d like to start by wishing all of you a very, very happy New Year! I know it’s been a tough winter, but there are better days ahead of us. As many of you know, I’ve always been a huge epidemiology nerd, and I’ve struggled to restrain myself in the past because I know that most of my audience really doesn’t want to hear about diseases even when we aren’t going through a major pandemic. Fair enough. So I’m excited for an excuse to turn back to my favorite subject, but I promise, in a happy, optimistic way. If 2020 was the story of a disease, 2021 is looking like the story of its cure. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine.

On July 4, 1885, a nine year old boy named Joseph Meister was attacked by a dog near his home in the city of Alsace. As he cowered and shielded his face with his tiny hands, the dog lunged at him again and again, biting him. A nearby bricklayer heard the screams and managed to beat the dog back with a pair of crowbars, but not until Joseph sustained fourteen bites on his thighs, legs and his hand. Joseph’s mother rushed him to the local doctor, who applied carbolic acid to the wounds, but the two adults looked at one another with a terrible fear. Joseph was at risk for one of humanity’s deadliest diseases, a disease scary enough to inspire not one but two terrifying mythical monsters, a disease with a nearly 100% fatality rate, a disease which guaranteed the worst of all 19th century fates: an ugly death. Joseph was at risk for rabies. Joseph’s mother, beside herself with worry, asked the doctor what else could be done. The doctor must have known Joseph was in dire straits, because he made a radical suggestion: take the boy to Paris, he said. There’s a scientist there, a famous scientist, who thinks he may have a solution. Joseph, still in unbearable pain, accompanied his mother to the train station at once, and within 48 hours of the attack, they found themselves in one of the strangest buildings they’d ever stepped inside: this was the laboratory of the great Louis Pasteur, and it was filled with rabid dogs.

In the long, strange cultural history of humans and diseases, rabies has always held a unique space in our minds – more specifically, in our amygdala, which controls fear. We’ve had rabies for just about as long as we’ve had domesticated dogs, and just about every ancient set of laws we can find has some sort of rule about how to handle wild dogs, rabid dogs, dogs who bite, and people who are bitten by dogs. The first known victim of rabies appears in a cuneiform tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, written about four thousand years ago. The ancient Greeks referred to lyssa, or a wild violence, while the Romans spoke of rabere – or “rage” from which we may get the word “rabies”. Over the centuries, across civilizations, the same disease appears again and again, and one thing in particular stands out: humans have always, it seems, known exactly where rabies comes from. Take a moment to appreciate that. Even during periods of time when diseases were the whims of god, justice for your sins, or the mysterious and unknowable slights of fate, rabies alone had a clear cause and effect. We didn’t have germ theory, we didn’t have microscopes, but there was one infection pathway that humans have pretty much always understood: mad dog bites man. Man goes mad. Mad dog and mad man die. The end. As it turns out, that wasn’t the entire story – it looks like rabies first made its way into bats, and then the bats found their way to the dogs, but again, in a world where you got smallpox because Zeus was in a bad mood or you lusted after your neighbor’s wife, let’s give the ancients credit where it’s due.

Over the centuries, the preventative measures and treatments for rabies grew accordingly sophisticated and complex. In ancient times, a bit of fur from the dog in question would be laid on top of the bite wound – remember that next time you fix yourself a mimosa because you need a little “hair of the dog” to cure what ails ya. By the middle ages, an apothecary would put together a salve of salt, vinegar, garlic, nettles, leeks, chives, and olive oil. It was utterly useless but I bet it tasted spectacular. But as always, when you want something to be done in an unnecessarily elaborate way, nobody can do a better job than the kings of France. Obsessed with la chasse, or ‘the hunt’, French kings and aristocrats spared no expense when it came to their game animals – and the dogs they used to track them. Each year, aristocrats would have their new hunting dogs shipped to the Church of St. Menier les moret, where the very confused canines would find themselves surrounded by monks chanting prayers, singing masses, and lighting candles in hopes that the dogs would be protected from