On the morning of July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in Paris. A rabid dog had bitten him fourteen times. In those days rabies was a death sentence. Pasteur had been working on a vaccine but had never tried it on a human being. Over the next ten days the boy received thirteen injections. Joseph Meister never developed the disease, and he became the first person vaccinated against rabies. Soon patients with animal bites poured in from France and other countries, and that flood of need led to the founding of the Institut Pasteur. A frightened boy received something he could never earn, and it gave him life. That is a picture of grace.
