Founding of the Pasteur Institute (1888)

Summary

In November 1888, Louis Pasteur opened the Institut Pasteur in Paris, a purpose-built research institute funded by international public subscription in the wake of his rabies vaccination trials. The immediate trigger was the treatment of Joseph Meister in July 1885, the first human to receive Pasteur’s antirabic inoculation; the success of the treatment generated international celebrity that translated into financial support from 43 countries, including a donation of 100,000 francs from Tsar Alexander III. The Institute housed the first cohort of germ theory researchers (Roux, Chamberland, Metchnikoff) and became the institutional template for national public health laboratories worldwide. Geison’s critical history, based on Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks made available only in 1964, shows that the founding rested on a more contested scientific and ethical record than the public ceremony represented.

Background

The Rabies Treatment and Its Aftermath

The chain of events that produced the Institut Pasteur begins with Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old Alsatian boy who arrived at Pasteur’s laboratory on July 6, 1885, two days after being severely bitten by a dog later found to have been rabid. His mother accompanied him; the wounds on one hand were deep. Pasteur consulted two physicians, Vulpian and Grancher, who examined Meister’s fourteen bites and advised that applying antirabic inoculation was not merely a right but a duty. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928)

Over the next ten days Pasteur inoculated Meister twelve times with preparations of desiccated rabbit spinal cord of progressively increasing virulence, concluding on July 16 with medulla that would kill rabbits through rabies within seven days, the most stringent test of immunity available. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) Meister survived. When Pasteur reported the case to the Académie des sciences on October 26, 1885, Meister remained in perfect health. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928)

The second celebrated case came in October 1885: Jean-Baptiste Jupille, fourteen (or fifteen in Geison’s account), a shepherd boy from the Jura who had fought off a rabid dog to protect five younger children, sustaining severe bites to both hands. Pasteur accepted him six days after the attack (more than twice the interval that had separated Meister’s bites from treatment), and Jupille also survived. Baron Larrey proposed him for a Montyon prize at the Académie for his courage. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) Geison’s account specifies that Jupille’s treatment began at 11 a.m. on October 20, 1885, and like Meister before him, he underwent a long series of daily injections of the new rabies vaccine (Geison, 1995). The statue of Jupille wrestling the dog still stands at the Institut Pasteur.

Vulpian’s address at the October 26 meeting framed the moment in the most expansive terms: hydrophobia, the dread disease against which all therapeutic measures had hitherto failed, had at last found a remedy. Bouley added: “from this day, humanity is armed with a means of fighting the fatal disease of hydrophobia.” (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The public reception of this announcement was immediate and international.

Between November 1885 and March 1, 1886, 350 people were treated at Pasteur’s laboratory. One died: Louise Pelletier, a ten-year-old girl whose bites had occurred thirty-seven days before treatment began. Pasteur had hesitated to accept her at such a late presentation but could not resist her parents’ pleas. He was at her bedside at the end. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) He reported her case directly and without concealment to the Académie; she was the only death among 350 patients.

In March 1886, nineteen Russian peasants from Smolensk arrived in Paris, savagely bitten by a rabid wolf. Their wounds were severe; Pasteur administered accelerated double-daily inoculations. Sixteen survived. Three died, a mortality rate of roughly sixteen percent against a baseline wolf-bite mortality that Vallery-Radot cites as eighty-two per hundred. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The return of the sixteen survivors was received in Russia with what Vallery-Radot describes as almost religious emotion. Tsar Alexander III sent the Cross of the Order of St. Anne of Russia in diamonds and donated 100,000 francs toward the proposed Pasteur Institute. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928)

The English Commission

The English Parliamentary Commission (Paget, Lister, Burdon Sanderson, Horsley, and colleagues) spent fourteen months examining Pasteur’s methods and reported to the Académie des sciences on July 4, 1887. Their conclusion: “M. Pasteur has discovered a prophylactic method against hydrophobia which may be compared with that of vaccination against small-pox… similar means might be employed to protect man and domestic animals against other virus as active as that of hydrophobia.” (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The comparison to smallpox vaccination placed Pasteur’s work in explicit succession to Jenner and defined the institutional programme that would follow.

Geison’s analysis qualifies this favorable judgment. The Commission’s proceedings had revealed that independent replication of Pasteur’s results was difficult and that the statistical basis for his claimed success rates was contested, with several commission members expressing reservations that were softened in the final report. (Geison, 1995) The gap between the public conclusion and the private deliberations is, for Geison, characteristic of how Pasteur’s work was publicly managed throughout this period.

The Founding

The Subscription Campaign

The Institute was funded by public subscription. Vallery-Radot gives the total as 2,586,680 francs, raised from contributors across what Geison’s account specifies as forty-three countries. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The Tsar’s 100,000 francs was the largest single gift; the Emperor of Brazil and the Sultan also contributed; the French Chambers voted 200,000 francs. Rich and poor gave; Vallery-Radot reports that ordinary people across France donated what they could afford. The total building cost reached approximately 1,563,786 francs, leaving over one million francs as an endowment. Additional income was expected from the anthrax vaccination service Chamberland had been running: between 1882 and 1887, nearly 1,600,000 sheep and almost 200,000 oxen had been vaccinated against anthrax under Chamberland’s direction. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928)

The subscription’s international character was itself a significant fact. The Institute was not a French state institution, though the state contributed to it. It was, as the subscription made visible, a response to a perceived benefit to all of humanity: exactly the framing Pasteur’s public rhetoric had established around the rabies results. The Russian case was, in this respect, strategically important: it demonstrated the treatment’s efficacy at scale, on patients who had arrived from abroad specifically to receive it, and it attached royal patronage to the Institute before the building had been completed.

The Opening Ceremony

The Institut Pasteur opened on November 14, 1888. Pasteur’s condition (he had suffered a second stroke) prevented him from delivering his speech directly; it was read by his son. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The address articulated a scientific philosophy at odds with how Geison’s later analysis would characterize Pasteur’s actual research practices:

“Never advance anything which cannot be proved in a simple and decisive fashion. Worship the spirit of criticism… constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, to fight with yourself, to try and ruin your own experiments and only to proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses.” (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928)

The irony that Geison’s notebooks analysis reveals is not simply biographical. Pasteur’s October 1885 paper to the Académie had presented the desiccated-cord method as a fully developed and standardized procedure while suppressing all mention of earlier failed cases. (Geison, 1995) His private notebooks record twenty-six post-bite dog experiments that had produced a success rate of approximately sixty-two percent against fifty-seven percent for untreated controls, a difference too small to be statistically significant, and the methods used on those dogs had not been identical to each other or to the protocol used on Meister. (Geison, 1995) (Geison, 1995) The “standardized method” described in the 1885 paper had not, by the notebook evidence, been validated as a consistent procedure before it was applied to the first human patient.

Personnel and Research Programme

The Institute opened with the core Pastorian team: Roux, Chamberland, and Émile Duclaux. The significant addition was Élie Metchnikoff, whose arrival brought a different theoretical perspective alongside the dominant germ theory programme. (Geison, 1995)

Metchnikoff had developed what he called the phagocyte theory of immunity: white blood corpuscles (leucocytes, which he named phagocytes) act as the organism’s defenders against microbial invasion. If they surround, ingest, and destroy the invading microbe, the organism resists; their victory provides reserve forces against renewed invasion. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) This was a theory of cellular immunity, as distinct from the chemical immunity theories that Roux and Chamberland were developing in other directions. Metchnikoff’s presence at the Institute placed these two theoretical frameworks (cellular and humoral immunity) in productive proximity, though also in tension.

Within six years of the opening, Roux and Yersin at the Institute isolated the diphtheria toxin and Roux developed the antitoxic serum. Clinical trials at the Enfants Malades hospital showed diphtheria mortality fall from fifty-one per hundred (the 1890–1893 baseline) to less than twenty-four per hundred in four months, against sixty per hundred at an untreated comparison hospital during the same period. (Vallery-Radot, René, 1928) The diphtheria antitoxin work confirmed the Institute’s programmatic logic: isolate the pathological agent, attenuate or neutralize it, return immunity to the organism. The rabies vaccine had demonstrated the vaccine approach; the diphtheria antitoxin demonstrated serotherapy.

Joseph Meister’s Later History

Joseph Meister, the boy whose survival in 1885 had launched the subscription campaign, later became a caretaker at the Institut Pasteur. (Geison, 1995) His fate at the Institute connects the founding moment to the most violent episode of the twentieth century, though the specific claim that Meister died by suicide in 1940 when German soldiers demanded access to Pasteur’s crypt requires corroboration.

Geison’s Critical Reading

Geison’s 1995 account of Pasteur’s private science provides the revisionist framework through which the founding of the Institut Pasteur must now be read. His analysis rests on 144 laboratory notebooks that the Pasteur family kept private for eighty-six years after Pasteur’s death, donating them to the Bibliothèque Nationale only in 1964. (Geison, 1995) This long embargo, a continuation of Pasteur’s own 1878 instruction that the notebooks remain private, made critical historical analysis impossible for nearly a century.

What the notebooks reveal, in Geison’s reading, is not a counter-myth but a corrective. (Geison, 1995) Pasteur made genuine and lasting contributions to science and to human health. But the methods through which those contributions were won were more complex, more compromised, and less admirable than the public legend has been willing to acknowledge. That legend was sustained by the authorized biography of René Vallery-Radot (Pasteur’s son-in-law), by the “conspiracy of silence” Geison attributes to Pasteur’s disciples including Roux, and by the international cult that reached its peak immediately after Pasteur’s 1895 state funeral. (Geison, 1995) (Geison, 1995) (Geison, 1995)

The specific elements of the founding legend that the notebooks complicate include: the adequacy of the animal evidence on which Pasteur decided to proceed to human subjects; the suppression of earlier failed human cases; and the gap between the scientific philosophy proclaimed at the inauguration ceremony and the research practices the notebooks record. Emile Roux, who knew the full private record, had refused to participate in the Meister treatment in July 1885 because he believed the move to human subjects was premature. (Geison, 1995) That dissent, never publicly disclosed, was absent from the Pasteur legend for the entire period in which the Institut Pasteur itself shaped how the founding was remembered. The difference in temperament between the two men was documented: in a letter of April 10, 1887 to Dr. Grancher, Pasteur wrote that “Roux is decidedly too timid,” adding that he understood Roux’s scruples without accepting them; Grancher later confirmed from his own experience treating Meister that Pasteur “lacked prudence in medical matters” and had made no provision for the possibility of partial failures of the rabies vaccine (Geison, 1995).

Pasteur’s mastery of what Geison calls the “rhetoric of science” (theatrical staging of experiments, management of press coverage, deployment of celebrity endorsers like Thomas Henry Huxley, strategic sequencing of public announcements) was, in Geison’s account, as significant a factor in the Institute’s founding as the scientific results themselves. (Geison, 1995) The Russian patients case in particular became an international news event that was used to demonstrate the vaccine’s efficacy at scale, even though the absence of proper controls made it impossible to determine how many of those treated would have survived without intervention. (Geison, 1995)

Aftermath and Legacy

The Institut Pasteur model, combining basic science, applied vaccine and serum production, and public health training, supported by a combination of state subsidy and commercial revenues from vaccine sales, was replicated across the world, particularly through French colonial public health networks in Africa and Asia.

The Institute today remains one of the world’s significant biomedical research institutions. Its laboratories worked on the identification of HIV in the 1980s (work for which Luc Montagnier received the Nobel Prize in 2008) and contributed to COVID-19 research beginning in 2020.

Pasteur died on September 28, 1895, at Villeneuve l’Etang. His state funeral was attended by the President of the French Republic, foreign dignitaries, and thousands of Parisians. (Geison, 1995) The ceremony confirmed his status as a French national hero and, as Geison notes, accelerated the process of mythologization that had already been underway for decades. The Institut Pasteur, which had opened to international acclaim seven years earlier, was both the primary vehicle and the primary beneficiary of that myth.

See Also

• Louis Pasteur
• Emile Roux
• Ilya Metchnikoff
• Joseph Meister
• Pouilly-le-Fort Anthrax Trial (1881)
• Germ Theory
• Rabies Vaccine
• Diphtheria Antitoxin
• Vaccine

Sources

Evidence drawn from:

• Vallery-Radot, R. (1928). The Life of Pasteur. Trans. Mrs R.L. Devonshire. Garden City: Doubleday. [vallery-radot-lifepasteur-1928] (ch13, ch14)
• Geison, G.L. (1995). The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton University Press. [geison-private-science-pasteur-1995] (ch08, ch09, ch10)

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work.