I have been for the past three years studying a disease which is called hydrophobia, or rabies. It is a disease which I believe to be caused by a microbe.
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"Happy is the man who has a vocation which he can follow with passion."
"I am utterly convinced that there is a germ for every disease."
"The scientist has to be a poet in his heart and a logician in his mind."
"The true character of a man is revealed in his actions, not in his words."
"The universe is asymmetric."
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Pasteur announces he has spent three years investigating rabies, a terrifying disease historically known as hydrophobia because victims feared water. He proposes that, like other infections he studied, rabies is caused by a tiny living organism, a microbe, rather than bad air, spiritual causes, or spontaneous generation. He is publicly declaring that even this mysterious nerve disease fits the germ theory framework and is worth attacking scientifically.
This statement captures Pasteur at his boldest. After proving germs caused fermentation, silkworm disease, and anthrax, he applied the same logic to rabies, even though the rabies agent is actually a virus too small to see in his microscopes. Undeterred, he cultured it in rabbit spinal cords and in 1885 saved nine-year-old Joseph Meister with the first post-exposure vaccine, founding the Pasteur Institute and cementing his identity as a relentless microbe hunter.
In the 1880s, rabies was a death sentence and a public nightmare, with mad-dog bites widely reported in European newspapers. Germ theory was still fiercely contested by miasma supporters and surgeons who refused antiseptics. Koch had just identified the tuberculosis and cholera bacilli, and Europe was racing to link specific microbes to specific diseases. Pasteur's France, rebuilding scientific prestige after the Franco-Prussian War, lavishly funded his lab, making such audacious microbial claims both newsworthy and nationally celebrated.
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