Louis Pasteur | Two autograph letters signed, 1884-1886, about his work on the rabies vaccine

Louis Pasteur

Two autograph letters signed ("L. Pasteur"), CONCERNING HIS WORK ON THE RABIES VACCINE

1) to an unnamed zoo director, asking him to provide him with better monkeys than the last ones he sent, noting that the last one was ill, did not eat and could not be used in his experiments [regarding rabies] ("...Le dernier livré notamment est malade, ne mange pas...et ne pourra probablement pas être utilisé dans mes expériences), 1 page, c.12.7 x 9.9cm, cut down from a larger leaf, stationery printed with Pasteur's monogram ("LP"), Arbois, 10 September 1884, pin holes

2) to the Paris correspondent of the Milan newspaper La Perseveranza, Jacques Caponi, asking him for explanation of a notice which appeared three days previously in the press, and referring to his inoculation of rabbits [with the rabies vaccine], 2 pages, integral blank, Paris, 20 November 1886, splitting to folds repaired

In 1885, Pasteur's seminal work on a vaccine against rabies led to the first successful treatment of the condition in a human, when Pasteur's associate Dr. Jacques Joseph Grancher saved the life of a nine-year-old dog-bite victim, Joseph Meister.