Licence: In copyright
Credit: Pasteur, science and medicine / by F.M. Sandwith. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![of rahios, l)cinp; shot, strangled, or suffocatod like wild beasts. Once more Pasteur eamc to our rc.seiie. lie had tried in vain to di.scover the specifie microbe of the di.sease, which appeared to be invisible to hnman sight, but when he found that this seemed an impossible task he tried another means of eomljating the enemy. Jle thought that preventive medicine might step in during “the long period of incubation of hydrophobia, by attempting to establish during the interval before the appearance of the first rabid symptoms a refractory condition in the subject bitten.” Until he took up the study of the disease it was not known where the seat of it lay, and this seemed to Pasteur the first problem to solve. He inoculated into rabbits saliva taken from rabid dogs, l)ut the incubation period was very long and the result was not always jiositive. He then tried inoculating the rabid blood into animals, but this had no result at all. “We must try other experiments,” he said. He finally came to the conclusion that the seat of the disease was in the nervous .system. “ The seat of the rabid virus,” wrote Pasteur, “is therefore not in the saliva only, the brain contains it in a degree of virulence at least ecjual to that of the saliva of rabid animals.” 'Trephining under anaesthetics, followed by inoculation of the virus, was j^erformed on dogs, with the result that in every case hydrophobia invariably occurred in a verv short time. Pasteur liad not been able to find the microbe, ljut he now knew definitely where it flourished. I cannot do better than describe the next experiment in the words of Vallcry-Eadot, tran.slated by ]\Ir. Devonshire :— “ As soon as a trephined and inoculated rabbit died](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22426292_0039.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
