“A Tale of Three Laboratories: Rabies Vaccination and the ...

“A Tale of Three Laboratories:
Rabies Vaccination and the Pasteurization of New York City, 1885-1920”
Jessica Wang
UBC History Department Colloquium
18 September 2012
Notes: This essay was originally written as a conference paper, but it is also a first draft of
Chapter 5 of my current book project, “Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: A History of Rabies
in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920.” I am currently faced with the challenges of rethinking
and reframing this material within the overall narrative of the book, and I welcome readers’
suggestions. At the colloquium I will provide some additional context, discuss potential ways of
reworking the analysis for the book chapter, and try to explore how the available primary source
base has shaped my options.
WORK IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE, QUOTE,
OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

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This essay serves as a companion piece to a recent article in the Journal of American
History, in which I examined the authority of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals (ASPCA) over canine animal control in turn-of-the-century New York City in order
to explore how ostensibly private organizations have carried out public functions throughout the
history of the United States. Urban governments around the world have long sought to curb
stray dog populations in order to prevent rabies (or hydrophobia, the predominant nineteenthcentury
term), a disease whose association with trusted companion animals, horrific symptoms,
and invariably fatal course has gripped the imagination throughout human history. In 1894, the
ASPCA gained the power to enforce New York’s dog laws, and it kept that authority despite
pressure from an increasingly ambitious municipal public health bureaucracy and a changing
legal environment in the early decades of the twentieth century. The history of urban dogcatching,
I suggested, points to the blended nature of public-private relations that have permeated
governance in the United States throughout its history, and that needs to be incorporated into
more conventional narratives about the rise of bureaucracy, expertise, and expanded
administrative capacity as the essence of American state-building. 1
Canine animal control constituted just one side of urban rabies prevention and
management. In October 1885, the renowned French scientist Louis Pasteur announced his
laboratory’s development of preventive rabies vaccination, in which a series of inoculations with
attenuated virus offered an effective means of building immunity in humans bitten by rabid
animals during the interim—usually several weeks—between initial exposure and the onset of
disease. Pasteur treatment promised a powerful new means of protecting the public health from
a dreaded scourge. Rabies vaccination arrived in the United States not through the initiative of
public health officials, however, but via the efforts of newly founded private institutions.

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Alexander and Valentine Mott’s American Pasteur Institute (API) faltered in its early attempt to
introduce Pasteur’s prophylactic against rabies to New York City in 1886, but where it failed,
Paul Gibier’s New York Pasteur Institute (NYPI) succeeded in 1890. Together with the
ASPCA’s animal control apparatus, the NYPI’s rabies vaccination efforts defined a system for
rabies prevention in which private, voluntary associations carried out public health functions, as
part of the complex mixture of public and private authority that has defined American political
development in ways historians are just beginning to understand.
Here I examine the history of rabies vaccination in New York City as a way to continue
my investigation of the public-private relationship in American governance. In particular, the
New York Pasteur Institute (NYPI) and its combination of commercial, philanthropic, and public
endeavor crossed public and private in multiple fashions during its heyday in the 1890s.
Competition from the New York City Department of Health, along with long-term consequences
flowing from the untimely death of Paul Gibier, the NYPI’s founder, ultimately forced the
institute’s closure in 1918. Nonetheless, its key role in introducing preventive hydrophobia
vaccination to New York City, and its dominance in the field for at least a decade, offer
opportunities for considering the fluid nature of the public-private boundary and the convoluted
status of health and infectious disease as both private and public matters at the turn of the century.
The history of public health encompassed more than the work of formally constituted health
departments: as the history of rabies vaccination attests, private organizations also played
integral and leading roles in the institutional networks of urban public health provision at the turn
of the century.
The history of medicine offers a particularly illuminating opportunity for examining the
distinction between public and private because health militates in basic ways against any neat

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division between the two. In the United States, the notion of the liberal subject as an embodied,
autonomous individual underscores the private side of health: ultimately, private individuals hold
responsibility for the intimate duty of caring for and maintaining their own bodies. The rise of
the American medical profession as one of individual practitioners in business for themselves
has also reinforced the idea of health as part of the private realm of the marketplace. Yet, health
has always been public as well. On a daily level, the disposal of one’s bodily wastes and other
practices related to personal cleanliness had the potential to create nuisances or spread disease.
In cases of infectious disease, an individual’s illness was not his or hers alone, and the threat of
contagion made certain medical conditions public virtually by definition. Hence nuisance
abatement and public health, including the power of quarantine, have been among the most
elemental of state functions in the history of the United States. By the late nineteenth century,
reformers’ growing consciousness about the larger social costs of non-infectious medical
conditions—for example, the price society paid for bodies maimed in the factory or ruined by
overwork or alcohol abuse—also made those maladies not just matters of suffering for the
individual to manage, but also issues of public concern. Today, when economists and
statisticians calculate the economic costs of cancer or other medical conditions, they transform
individual, privatized suffering into aggregate social phenomena worthy of public scrutiny. One
could say that death is private, while mortality is public. In that sense, one can hardly imagine
any medical problem that cannot be made both private and public. 2
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rabies and its management exhibited
this dual character. Hydrophobia usually killed no more than a handful of individuals in New
York City during a given year, and to that extent, it was more a disease of individual misfortune
and sorrow than a major threat to the public at large. But the intense fears surrounding the horror

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of rabies and the specter of mad dogs spreading the worst kind of death also made the disease a
public health issue, and cities developed various systems for controlling the stray dog population.
As I have written elsewhere, those systems themselves blended together private and public
sources of authority. 3
Rabies vaccination proceeded similarly. In New York City, ostensibly
private organizations introduced the procedure, but they did so with public purposes, and the
New York Pasteur Institute’s responsibilities for providing vaccination to state residents in need
were soon written into law. Although the city health department ultimately took the upper hand
in the vaccination franchise, a distribution system that encompassed private physicians, hospitals,
and public health offices also highlighted the entanglement of public and private.
Before I detail this history through the examination of the three successive institutional
structures and patronage systems that defined rabies vaccination in New York City between 1886
and 1918, some caveats about terminology are in order. The rabies vaccination procedure that
Pasteur developed was prophylactic and not curative in nature, but because it required a long
series of injections over a two- to three-week period, contemporary observers often referred to it
colloquially as a treatment. Common terms for rabies vaccination included “Pasteur treatment”
or the Department of Health’s “preventive hydrophobia treatment,” and I employ those
expressions interchangeably with “rabies vaccination” and other present-day usages. Also, the
“rabies virus” that appears in this essay is not, at a conceptual level, the bullet-shaped
rhabdovirus that we think of today, with its RNA-based genome covered by a glycoprotein
membrane. Rather, turn-of-the-century advocates of bacteriological knowledge and its
application described a vaguer “microbe” or “germ” of rabies that they hoped to describe more
fully, but that defied visualization by the means they had on hand.

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Finally, the reader should keep in mind the limitations of sources. Available primary
materials for the New York City Department of Health include minutes and annual reports, but
the agency’s more detailed administrative records and the papers of key figures such as Hermann
M. Biggs and William H. Park have not survived. Moreover, no archival collections whatsoever
exist for the American Pasteur Institute, the New York Pasteur Institute, or the physicians
involved in them, and other than the in-house journal that the NYPI published between 1893 and
1900, newspapers offer the primary means for reconstructing their histories. Until recently, it
was almost hopeless to try and understand the history of either of these two organizations in any
detail, but thanks to databases with keyword searches, historical newspapers offer incredible
sources for studying everyday subjects over long periods of time. Although replete with vagaries,
inaccuracies, and contradictions that demand analytical caution and a certain amount of
speculation, newspapers offer vital means for uncovering the archive-poor history of public
health in late nineteenth and early twentieth century New York City.
Thwarted expectations: The rise and fall of the American Pasteur Institute
Within a matter of months following Pasteur’s historic 1885 announcement, patients and
visitors from around the world streamed to his Paris laboratory, as victims of dangerous animal
bites undertook inoculation against rabies, and as physicians sought to learn and evaluate
Pasteur’s techniques. Bert Hansen has provided a lavish historical account of how the saga of
the Newark boys—the December 1885 journey of four working class New Jersey children to
Paris to undergo Pasteur treatment following bites from an alleged mad dog—transformed the
news of Pasteurian rabies vaccination from ordinary scientific advance to breakthrough
discovery and public sensation in the United States during the winter of 1885-86. 4
Reports about

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the circulation of biological materials and knowledge of techniques that accompanied the flow of
patients and medical professionals in and out of Paris quickly raised expectations for the
availability of rabies vaccination in the United States. As the New York Times breathlessly
related, Dr. Frank S. Billings, the veterinary expert who escorted the Newark boys, departed
from Paris “one of the happiest men that ever sailed,” because “he carries home several boxes of
scientific instruments, [and] numerous vials of virus of several kinds.” Although Billings “could
not take rabies virus because it will only keep four or five days,” the paper assured readers that
“he knows how to prepare it.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle similarly predicted with complete
confidence that Billings “will doubtless be able to proceed according to the Pasteur method,” and
only the need to raise funds stood in the way of creating an American facility to provide rabies
vaccination. 5
Both stories were inaccurate—although Pasteur treated foreign patients, he did not
receive visitors for purposes of detailed observation and dissemination of his techniques for
prophylactic rabies inoculation until several months later, and Billings never attempted rabies
vaccination in the United States. Such newspaper coverage, however, exemplified the sense of
anticipation and excitement surrounding the Newark boys’ story.
Indeed, although the newspapers erred in their reports about Billings, a group led by two
prominent New York physicians, Alexander B. Mott and his son, Valentine Mott, quickly
mobilized to bring Pasteur treatment to the United States. The Motts represented an exalted
medical lineage that granted them stature and visibility in New York City’s medical and social
circles. Valentine Mott was named after his grandfather, the pioneering vascular surgeon and a
leading figure in American medicine both locally and nationally. Although neither son nor
grandson achieved the eminence of their illustrious progenitor, Alexander Mott earned a
respected reputation as a surgeon. He helped to found Bellevue Medical College, and he joined

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Bellevue’s founding faculty. His son Valentine embarked upon a career as a surgeon in 1879,
when he joined Bellevue as an attending physician; at the time of his death in 1918, he was best
known for his attempt to bring Pasteur treatment to New York City. 6
The Motts launched their effort in January 1886, when they led eight New Yorkers from
the city’s overlapping medical, theatrical, and francophone social circles in filing a certificate of
incorporation for an American Pasteur Institute. 7
Newspapers as far away as Idaho and
California took note of the new institute’s creation. 8
The Motts’ associates included the Frenchborn
and -trained paragon of American veterinary medicine, Alexandre Liautard; Michael J. B.
Messemer, a Tammany insider and chief coroner for the city; and Louis de Plasse, a physician
and Belgian noble. Their other partners, if I have identified them correctly, were Charles Villa, a
French transplant associated with the newspaper États Unis and with the city’s French-speaking
elites; “Professor” Adolph Corbett, a concert hall proprietor seemingly in search of
respectability; and Charles F. Nirdlinger, aspiring playwright and author. These diverse
identities indicate the connections and networks that defined the male social world of New
York’s medical elites, as well as the francophone émigré community’s role in trying to bring
Pasteur’s rabies vaccination techniques to the United States. 9
The newly founded institute promised “gratuitous care and treatment by the Pasteur
system of inoculation” and “the study and scientific examination of the causes, development and
improved means of treating hydrophobia.” 10
As a first step toward this objective, the API
immediately announced plans to have a physician visit Paris and learn Pasteur’s methods, and
Alexander B. Mott highlighted the API’s intent to operate as a purely philanthropic enterprise,
dependent on donors. In addition to learning the proper techniques, he observed, “Suitable
buildings must by procured, animals inoculated and a series of experiments made to satisfy the

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operator and those interested in the institution. For all this it requires money, and that can only
be raised slowly and through the well known liberality of the public.” 11
Pasteur initially rebuffed
the elder Mott’s request to send someone to study in his laboratory with the dismissal, “You go
too fast.” Mott responded by emphasizing the API’s seriousness of purpose and the need for a
Pasteur Institute in the United States, in order to avoid the delays and high travel costs for animal
bite victims who required vaccination as soon as possible. Pasteur did not respond immediately,
but by early spring 1886, as he started to pursue institutional expansion, including fund-raising
for a permanent rabies vaccination facility in Paris as well as the establishment of similar
operations elsewhere around the world, he began to welcome foreign visitors who wanted to
study his methods. At the end of March he invited Alexander Mott to send “a young physician”
to Paris, and Valentine Mott immediately set sail. 12
The younger Mott arrived in Paris on April 6, headed straight for Pasteur’s laboratory,
and quickly gained a strong sense of confidence about how to reproduce the French master’s
techniques. Pasteur’s procedure relied upon the changes in microbial virulence that he and his
collaborators learned to produce under controlled laboratory conditions, and that were central to
his earlier work on vaccines for chicken cholera and anthrax, as well as Robert Koch’s research
on anthrax and other infectious diseases. The virulence of an infectious agent, as measured by
the incubation period between exposure and onset of symptoms, shifts under a variety of
conditions, such as passage from one species to another, serial passage among individuals of the
same species, or as a result of laboratory manipulation. In the case of rabies, Pasteur and Émile
Roux inoculated rabbits with rabies by applying material derived from a dead rabid dog’s spinal
marrow directly onto the rabbits’ brains. They found that the rabbits developed disease more
readily than dogs, and that after forty to fifty passages through rabbits, the incubation period

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declined from fifteen to seven days before stabilizing. The highly virulent strain of rabies in
rabbits, however, could be attenuated by excising the dead rabbits’ spinal cords, and drying strips
of the cords under controlled conditions. Dessicated cords gradually declined in virulence, such
that after fourteen days they became weak enough to use for commencing immunization.
Through inoculation with a series of cord-based preparations in sequence from weak to strong
virulence, Pasteur and Roux’s method allowed patients to build immunity to rabies. 13
In a letter to his father, Mott detailed his first day in the laboratory. He observed and
carefully described the inoculation of cord-based solution into dozens of human patients, and he
witnessed the preparation of spinal cord from a dead rabbit, the trephination and inoculation of a
live rabbit with rabies virus, and the storage jars where dried cords were kept in sequence. One
assumes Mott had read Pasteur’s dramatic paper of October 26, 1885, which announced the first
successful application of prophylactic rabies treatment in humans and detailed Pasteur’s methods
for producing attenuated rabies virus, and after just a day in Paris, he already thought he
thoroughly understood the necessary procedures. As Mott noted towards the end of his letter to
his father, “I saw the method of keeping the virus in jars. At present Pasteur begins with virus
fourteen days old and ends with virus five days old, the strength diminishing as it grows older.
So much for the process. I feel confident that I could do the whole without any trouble, care and
cleanliness being all that is needed, once knowing what is to be done.” 14 Although the API
originally expected its emissary would require several months of study, Mott spent just a month
overseas before boarding a ship with a rabies-inoculated rabbit gifted from Pasteur and heading
home. 15 The introduction of rabies vaccination to New York City did not proceed nearly as
smoothly as Mott expected, however. Although some parts of the chronology are not entirely

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clear, the American Pasteur Institute provided Pasteur treatment to just a dozen patients by the
end of 1886, and although it may have survived on paper for another year, it probably took no
new patients in 1887. The vagaries of transferring knowledge and laboratory practices conspired
with the dynamics of expectation, disappointment, and media attention, and the expected
philanthropic support never materialized.
Valentine Mott encountered more difficulty than he had originally anticipated in
reproducing the Pasteur laboratory’s methods. The textbook outline of Pasteur and Roux’s
procedure sounds simple enough, although one senses, as did observers in the late nineteenth
century, the dangers of using live virus, especially from the increasingly fresh cords towards the
end of the inoculation sequence. Real-world experience, however, proved another matter
entirely for the American Pasteur Institute. Scholarship in science studies has long established
the difficulty of translating laboratory practices from one locale to another, the tacit forms of
knowledge required to replicate experiments, and the sociological dimensions of deciding
whether failure to reproduce results reflects faulty techniques or disproof of the original
findings. 16
Any university student who has ever taken a lab course also knows through direct
experience the difficulty of reproducing even the simplest experiments and most established
scientific results. In the case of Pasteur treatment, by the summer of 1886 a series of foreign
visitors, including Mott, had studied preventive rabies treatment in Paris. Upon their respective
departures, Pasteur provided each of them with “the raw material”—such as the culture medium
of a rabies-inoculated rabbit that Mott received—with which to establish facilities for Pasteur
treatment in their home countries. 17
That training, however, did not guarantee the establishment
of new institutions. For example, as Gerald L. Geison has explained, two of the early visitors, G.
Amoroso from the medical faculty of the University of Naples and Anton von Frisch of the

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Vienna Polyclinic, became powerful critics of Pasteur because they were unable to reproduce the
French scientist’s findings, but Pasteur and his backers argued that Amoroso had misrepresented
his qualifications, and that von Frisch had faulty laboratory technique. The determination in
favor of Pasteur’s original results over Amoroso’s and von Frisch’s failed confirmation depended
less on decisive evidence and pure reason than on Pasteur’s superior ability to mobilize support
for his views, particularly within the nationalist environment of the French Académie de
médicine. 18
In the United States, Mott achieved decidedly mixed laboratory results. He expected a
rapid start-up, and newspapers reported a lively scene of rabbits at various stages of inoculation
in the Mott family home days after the younger Mott’s return from Paris. 19
Valentine Mott also
used the spurt of press attention surrounding his return to remind the public of the funds
necessary to support New York’s new medical enterprise. The API, he stated, needed just $5000
to establish itself on a firm basis. “Here,” he exhorted, “is an opportunity for some of our rich
men. So far a few medical men have defrayed all the expenses incurred, but that cannot go on
forever….even rabbits cost money.” 20
Towards the end of May, the Motts announced their
acquisition of space at Bellevue Medical College’s Carnegie Laboratory and their expectation of
opening for patients in ten days. 21
Shortly thereafter, however, delays and setbacks mounted. In early June, a boy from
Cincinnati who had suffered a bite from a suspected rabid cat, and a Westchester County boy
bitten by a possible mad dog arrived in New York City with their parents in hope of undergoing
Pasteur treatment. Both boys came from poor families and lacked the financial means to travel
to Paris, but Mott still had not managed to produce a regular enough sequence of dessicated
spinal cords. Although Pasteur’s method seemed clear and simple in theory, neither of the Motts

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specialized in infectious diseases, and as surgeons of their respective generations, they probably
possessed little experience with microbial laboratory techniques. The translation of principles
and observations into direct practice therefore did not proceed smoothly. Ultimately, neither
child undertook treatment in New York; their subsequent fate remains unknown. 22
The Motts tried again a month later, but the American Pasteur Institute’s first recorded
attempt at treating a patient ended prematurely with the boy’s inability to tolerate the injections.
Seven-year-old Harold Newell of Jersey City was bitten by the family’s pet dog on June 24, and
the dog’s subsequent aggressiveness and sudden death two days letter led the boy’s father, a
physician, to suspect rabies. William T. Newell, the father, took his son to New York City to
consult with Valentine Mott, and Mott’s post-mortem analysis of the dog, which revealed
material from a door mat in its stomach, also seemed highly suggestive of rabies. Mott still did
not have the necessary sequence of rabbit cords, but he hoped to be ready within a few days.
Finally, on July 5, Mott administered the first of a planned series of fourteen injections.
Expectations still ran high. The Daily Picayune of New Orleans, for example, described Mott’s
intense and heroic dedication: “Since his return from Paris with a rabbit inoculated by Pasteur,
Dr. Mott has devoted every minute to the propagation of virus in successive stages of virility and
is now ready to proceed in strict accordance with the Pasteur system.” 23 Harold developed
episodes of weakness and nervousness following the inoculations, however, and after the fourth
shot, Drs. Mott and Newell agreed to abandon the treatment. Newell pronounced his son’s
adverse reactions a consequence of blood loss following a series of unfortunate accidents that
had befallen him in addition to the dog bite—a head wound from a rock thrown by another boy,
a fall and cut to the nose on the stairs to a train platform, a severe cut to the wrist from a broken

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pitcher—and he expressed his full confidence in the Pasteur method. 24 Nonetheless, the damage
had been done as far as the American Pasteur Institute was concerned.
The Motts’ enterprise attracted a relatively high level of public interest during the period
from Valentine Mott’s return from Paris to the saga of Harold Newell. Although not a lead story,
New York newspapers generally followed happenings at the American Pasteur Institute, and the
New York Herald paid particularly close and regular attention to its efforts. When little Harold
became a patient, papers from around the country, including nearby New Jersey, as well as Ohio,
Michigan, Missouri, Georgia, Louisiana, and California, picked up the story about the first-ever
application of the Pasteur treatment in America. 25
The newspapers did not report on whether or
not young Harold survived his multiple ordeals. From late May until late July, however, the
overall narrative arc of the New York effort to bring Pasteur treatment to the United States was
one of promise, delay, and finally, failure.
Funding woes accompanied the API’s unmet expectations during this critical period of
public attention. A commentator at the Weekly Detroit Free Press suggested the lack of donors
reflected the ebbing of interest following Pasteur’s dramatic announcement the previous fall.
The writer observed, “Popular interest here in Pasteur’s discovery has diminished very much
since the sensation caused by its first announcement….The tremendous hub-bub made about
those Newark children had its natural effect. After high excitement there came reaction and a
sort of indifference.” 26
Pasteur himself, however, certainly experienced no such difficulties
following his initial triumph. A steady flow of patients quickly developed, and funds poured into
Paris. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, by early June 1886, Pasteur’s laboratory had
already examined some 1100 patients and raised $200,000. By contrast, the Boston Daily
Advertiser reported that as of July 7, as Harold Newell commenced treatment, the Motts had

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received just “two $10 subscriptions,” and Alexander Mott warned that the American Pasteur
Institute would have to close its doors by the end of August if higher levels of support did not
appear. 27 The American Pasteur Institute’s long-delayed opening and its failure to administer a full
course of treatment to its very first patient likely doomed its prospects. The Motts’ promises fell
flat compared to the drama surrounding Pasteur’s triumphant announcement of October 1885 and
his subsequent record of regular success in immunizing patients. The American media
environment proved unforgiving, and the API never recovered from the early blows to its
reputation. In the middle of August, when the institute administered full courses of Pasteur
treatment to two new patients, the papers paid little attention, and furthermore, a bitter Valentine
Mott ducked the few reporters’ inquiries that materialized. “I don’t think the public have a right
to know,” he testily informed the New York Tribune. He complained, “The public have shown
no disposition to subscribe to the support of our institution and I do not care for any further
notoriety in connection with it.” 28
Two weeks later, Mott presented a paper at the American
Social Science Association’s annual meeting in which he expounded upon Pasteur’s methods and
treatment record at length. At the end of his presentation, he briefly recounted his successful
treatment of three cases, two involving bites from dogs that “were undoubtedly mad,” as well as
his own self-inoculation against rabies. 29 A couple of newspapers issued desultory reports of
Mott’s general comments about rabies and the treatment of dog bites, but stayed silent about the
American Pasteur Institute’s latest developments. 30
The Motts, it seems, had missed their
window of opportunity.
Continued problems with preparing the required range of attenuated virus may have also
impeded the Motts. By the end of 1886, the American Pasteur Institute had treated about twelve

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people, including three Mississippi children who traveled with their parents to New York City in
November. The fact that the API did not have sufficiently attenuated virus on hand to treat the
children, who had to wait three days before commencing injections, suggests that the institute
still had not managed to routinize the preparation of rabbit cords. Then in January 1887, when a
New York society woman sought Pasteur treatment following a suspicious bite from a pet dog,
Alexander Liautard and Valentine Mott provided her with a letter of introduction to Pasteur, and
she set sail for Paris rather than undergoing inoculation in New York City. That circumstance,
combined with a lack of subsequent references to Mott’s outfit, suggests that the American
Pasteur Institute had closed its doors, although possibly it limped along as an institutional entity
on paper for another year. 31 Thus the first American effort at importing Pasteur’s regime for
preventive hydrophobia treatment ran its course, and the Motts’ attempt to tie private
philanthropy to public health ended in failure.
Private auspices and public purposes: The New York Pasteur Institute and rabies vaccination in
New York City
For the next three years, Americans who wanted to undergo Pasteur treatment had no
choice but to head for Europe. Then in February 1890, the New York Pasteur Institute
pronounced itself open and ready to receive patients. Unlike the American Pasteur Institute, the
new body soon built a firm place for itself in New York City’s medical establishment, thanks to
its technical mastery of Pasteur’s treatment regimen, as well as a range of funding mechanisms
that encompassed private donations, patients’ voluntary payments for rabies vaccination, the
commercial production and sale of biological agents for pharmaceutical purposes, and public
funding from local and state governments. This diverse set of financial arrangements crossed the

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line between public and private in multiple directions. Was the NYPI a philanthropic enterprise?
A specialized hospital? A commercial venture? An arm of New York City’s public health
apparatus? Ultimately, it was all of these things, which reflected the blended world of public and
private that defined American political economy and governance.
On February 18, 1890, the New York Pasteur Institute opened with a modest reception
for twenty or so local French dignitaries, medical professionals, and journalists. Paul Gibier, the
new institute’s founder, briefly described Pasteur’s vaccination procedure, promised treatment
free of charge to those in need, provided a tour of the facility, and showed his visitors displays of
the brain and spinal cord of a dissected rabbit and a live rabbit in the final stages of rabies. 32
The
active launching of the NYPI also proceeded smoothly, and in contrast to the American Pasteur
Institute, a steady stream of patients quickly developed. During one week alone in July 1890,
Gibier’s outfit admitted ten new patients, for a total of twenty-five actively undergoing treatment,
with 310 inoculations delivered in that seven-day period. By October, the New York Pasteur
Institute had examined 610 worried animal bite victims and successfully administered Pasteur
treatment to 130, a salutary outcome at a time when Pasteur institutes generally lost about one
percent of patients vaccinated, usually as a result of delays in seeking treatment. Just under half
of the vaccinated patients came from New York state, while the rest came from an additional
eighteen states plus one person from Ontario, Canada. In line with Gibier’s stated commitment
to philanthropy, eighty of the initial 130 recipients of preventive rabies vaccination received free
treatment. 33
Bert Hansen has suggested that Gibier succeeded where the Motts failed thanks to good
timing, because by 1890 “the notion of medical progress had become more widely grounded” in
American culture. 34 Cultural change might offer part of the explanation, but Gibier possessed

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other significant advantages as well, including extensive experience with infectious disease, a
deft ability to mobilize Pasteur’s reputation on his behalf, and, as the NYPI evolved over time,
an institutional model that relied on diverse sources of funding, as well as diversification in its
offerings. Indeed, within a few years, Gibier had the makings of an impressive biomedical
empire.
In the years leading up to his move to New York, Gibier became increasingly occupied
with infectious disease and its management within the evolving framework of the bacteriological
revolution. Gibier was born in 1851, served in the military during the Franco-Prussian war of
1870-71, and at various points worked in a machine shop and as a railroad clerk before
embarking on a medical career in Paris. He studied medicine at the University of Paris, worked
as a resident in some of the major city hospitals in the early 1880s, and obtained a laboratory
position at the Museum of Natural History (Muséum d’histoire naturelle), one of the leading
institutions of nineteenth-century French science. There he worked as an assistant to Henri
Bouley, the prominent French veterinary expert who held the professorship in comparative
pathology at the museum and who served as president of the French Academy of Sciences in
1884-85. Under Bouley’s guidance, Gibier pursued a variety of research projects, including a
series of experiments on rabies in animals that earned him a medical doctorate from the Faculty
of Medicine at Paris in 1884. 35
Gibier’s doctoral thesis provides considerable evidence of his laboratory skills and
familiarity with the methods of bacteriological research. His dissertation discussed experiments
that he had conducted on a wide range of topics, including laboratory techniques for inoculating
animals with rabies, the use of cold temperatures for attenuating rabies virus and other infectious
agents, and some cases in which animals had possibly gained immunity from exposure to

18
attenuated virus, although Gibier cautioned that he had not had time to confirm that result. He
also reported some negative findings. All manner of histological methods proved inadequate to
identify the source of rabies, although as a confirmed follower of germ theory, he remained
certain that “the microbe of rabies exists.” Gibier also tested therapeutic agents on rats ranging
from garlic to chemicals such as strychnine, as well as different mixtures of oxygen and air at
various pressures, and confirmed that none showed any preventive or curative effects. 36 This
research record indicates the broad array of skills that Gibier possessed, such as ease with the
handling and manipulation of microbial cultures and laboratory animals; an ability to maintain
constant laboratory conditions, including constant temperature through the use of a specialized
apparatus; and familiarity with a broad array of histological techniques for examining animal
cells and tissues. All were necessary prerequisites for the successful transfer of Pasteurian rabies
vaccination to the United States.
After completing his doctoral thesis, Gibier moved beyond the laboratory to problems of
infectious disease in the field, and starting in the mid-1880s, he held several important official
appointments in the French scientific and public health establishment. In 1884, he took part in
an official medical mission, sponsored by the Ministry of the Interior, to organize medical aid in
the department of Midi during that year’s cholera epidemic. The following year, Gibier served
on the Ministry of Public Instruction’s scientific mission to Germany to study the organization of
medical laboratories, and he also traveled under official auspices to Spain to study Spanish
physician Jaime Ferrán’s cholera vaccination methods. For his work on cholera, Gibier was
awarded the title of Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor in 1886. In its dossier on Gibier,
the Légion d’Honneur also noted his scientific discoveries and written work in the field of
medicine, especially infectious diseases that included anthrax, typhoid, rabies and cholera. The

19
French government subsequently dispatched Gibier to Havana in 1887 to investigate the
microbial source of yellow fever. There he joined the legion of researchers who claimed,
incorrectly, to have isolated the microbial sources of yellow fever. A year later, Gibier headed
from Cuba to Florida to continue his yellow fever research. 37 In contrast to the Motts’ limited
experience, during the 1880s Gibier built an extensive record of engagement with problems of
infectious disease, full familiarity with bacteriological techniques, and ties to the powerful
French institutional apparatus of laboratory-based medicine and public health prior to his
introduction (or re-introduction) of Pasteurian rabies vaccination to the United States.
Gibier also created a public impression of close personal ties to Pasteur, in contrast to the
scant few weeks Valentine Mott spent in Paris in order to establish a Pasteurian reputation. In
the late nineteenth century, the ability to claim direct ties to Pasteur constituted a significant
resource which providers of rabies vaccination and other laboratory-based services for
combatting infectious diseases used to establish their reputations and authority. As John
Strachan has observed in his historical work on the Pasteur Institute of Algeria, “The Pastorian
mystique had the potential to confer considerable status on doctors and scientists who could trace
themselves back to Pasteur or to one of his close associates….Lineage became the hallmark of
professionalism and the criteria by which the authenticity of would-be Pastorians could be
judged.” 38 That logic held not just for Pasteur Institutes at far reaches within the French empire,
but also elsewhere around the world, including the United States. 39
The historical reality behind Gibier’s Pasteurian linkages and his move to New York,
however, is far more complex, and the extent of Pasteur’s support is difficult to determine. 40
The
Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, the only major reference source where Gibier appears,
names him as a friend of Pasteur and also the prominent French chemist Michel Eugène

20
Chevreul. One could easily imagine such a connection developing via Bouley, Gibier’s mentor,
who carried on an extensive correspondence with Pasteur. 41 But Gibier’s scientific reputation in
France also suffered because of his intense interest in psychic phenomena, particularly after he
published his 1887 book, Le Spiritisme (Fakirisme Occidental), and other investigations of the
supernatural. Various forms of spiritualism or belief in psychic phenomena were not wildly
unorthodox in the late nineteenth century, however, and Gibier’s commissions to study yellow
fever suggest a significant degree of continued confidence in his scientific abilities. The
dictionary entry on Gibier postulates that he lost his position at the Museum of Natural History
because of his spiritualist explorations, but it also indicates that Pasteur himself tapped Gibier for
the yellow fever studies. 42
Other accounts contemporaneous with Gibier’s lifetime reported that he came up with the
idea of opening a Pasteur Institute while visiting New York City after his sojourns in Cuba and
Florida, and the city’s medical community welcomed the prospect. According to this version of
events, Gibier then returned to Paris, discussed the possibility with Pasteur and earned his
support during the winter of 1889-90, and then launched the New York Pasteur Institute with the
great French savant’s blessing. 43 In New York City, Gibier touted his own Pasteurian
credentials, and newspapers depicted him as a disciple. When the New York Pasteur Institute
first opened, for example, news coverage variously described him as “repeatedly engaged in
work with Pasteur and other eminent scientists,” a past “assistant to Pasteur and Paul Bert,”
“formerly Pasteur’s co-laborer,” “a pupil of Pasteur,” and “a long time pupil and associate of M.
Pasteur.” 44 Reports in later years continued to describe him in similar terms: for example, as
“one of the first physicians who became pupils of Pasteur” or “physician-pupil in the Pasteur
laboratory.” 45 Newspapers presumably gained these impressions from Gibier himself, and they

21
occasionally provided direct quotations. In a February 1890 interview with a reporter from the
Knoxville Journal, for example, Gibier emphasized that the virus he used for vaccinations was
“identical” with Pasteur’s, and he stated confidently, “I was with [Pasteur] for several years and
am familiar with all his methods and especially with the preparation and application of the
virus.” 46 Independent confirmation of such claims is difficult to find, but Gibier probably was not
as close to Pasteur as such quotations implied. His 1896 memorial essay to Pasteur, published in
the NYPI’s in-house journal, suggested a more modest connection—Gibier cited his “good
fortune to study under the direction of the illustrious and regretted creator of bacteriology” and
“at a certain moment to assist him in his experiments” related to anthrax, but did not identify
himself as a full-blown student or assistant. 47
He certainly did not belong to the elite pantheon of
close senior collaborators such as Emile Roux and Elie Metchnikoff, or the “great Pasteurians”
among Pasteur’s students, in particular, Albert Calmette, Alexandre Yersin, Charles Nicolle, and
Jules Bordet, and the New York Pasteur Institute never established a direct institutional linkage
to Paris. 48 Gibier did, however, have a keen interest in the kinds of practical scientific problems
that motivated Pasteur’s followers, as evidenced by his publications on microbiology and its
agricultural applications, and on the etiology, symptoms, treatment, and prevention of infectious
diseases, including cholera, rabies, and yellow fever, and he likely learned how to attenuate
rabies virus and vaccinate patients along with the coterie of French physicians who picked up the
technique at Pasteur’s laboratory in the 1880s. 49
Whatever the specifics of Gibier’s relationship
to Pasteur, his relative marginality within the institutional networks of the overseas Pasteur
institutes should not exclude him from a share of the Pasteurian legacy. Even the officially
recognized branches, mainly in French colonial outposts, had to establish their reputations on

22
their own before gaining formal status from Paris. 50 Elsewhere, “several institutes created
unilaterally in various countries around the world…took the name of Pasteur without
authorization from the mother institution,” and the energetic and effective activities of selfdeclared
Pasteurians with weaker ties to central authority contributed to the dissemination of
Pasteur’s image, ideas, and practices worldwide. 51 Gibier invoked Pasteur in order to promote
his own prospects in the United States, but through his success, he also extended the reach of
Pasteurian science.
Finally, diversification in patronage and products contributed strongly to the New York
Pasteur Institute’s institutional ascendance in the 1890s. Gibier embarked on his rabies
vaccination enterprise with his own funds, but he quickly developed other sources of support.
The New York Pasteur Institute promised free treatment to anyone in need who could not afford
to undergo vaccination, but it also emphasized that those with the means ought to pay. For a full
course of Pasteur treatment, Gibier generally charged $100, not including room and board. 52
On
top of that, donations provided a key resource for maintenance and expansion. Just months after
the institute opened, a donor in the form of an unnamed “wealthy Wall Street man” promised
funds for a new building near Central Park, and the NYPI moved to a stately five-story building
of brick and stone with generous laboratory facilities and comfortable accommodations for
patients opened at Central Park West and 97 th Street in June 1893. 53 In other cases, donations
became a private source of public health provision. For example, the nearly $800 left over from
the public subscription for the Newark children was handed over to the NYPI in March 1891, in
exchange for free treatment of patients from New Jersey for the next five years. 54
Direct state
funding played a similar role. In late May 1895, the New York state legislature passed “an Act
to provide for a permanent establishment for the cure and prevention of hydrophobia.” The new

23
law appropriated $6000 annually to the New York Pasteur Institute in order to fund rabies
vaccination for indigents who were state residents, and it imposed state oversight, in the form of
inspection and annual reporting requirements. 55 Elsewhere, other local and state governments
also raised or appropriated funds to have their residents vaccinated. 56 Such official actions
signified the blurred boundaries of public and private that defined nineteenth-century governance
and the ways in which formalized governmental authority and the self-organized entities of civil
society combined to carry out the dictates of public policy. 57
The New York Pasteur Institute also advanced its fortunes by operating in part as a
commercial enterprise and expanding its list of products and services. Like most of the Pasteur
institutes around the world, both those formally affiliated with Paris and those established
independently, the NYPI used rabies vaccination as a starting point, but aspired towards
providing the full spectrum of therapeutics and prophylactics that represented the riches and
possibilities of the modern bacteriological laboratory. 58
Gibier conducted some original
investigations as well, but unlike the more prominent overseas Pasteur institutes with formal ties
to Paris, the NYPI never developed a distinguished research record.
The institute’s expanded horizons became apparent within its first year of operation. In
December 1890, when the NYPI organized formally as the New York Bacteriological Institute,
its certificate of incorporation announced general purposes beyond rabies vaccination, as an
establishment “for the study and gratuitous treatment of contagious diseases, comprising a
‘Koch’ and a ‘Pasteur’ department for the treatment of tuberculosis and hydrophobia.” 59
Historians of medicine and the bacteriological revolution have sometimes overestimated the
divide between French and German approaches—here, Gibier clearly planned to capitalize on all

24
that both bacteriological schools could offer, and to offer clinical applications based on the latest
scientific advances, whatever their source. 60
Soon the NYPI offered a variety of biological agents for physicians to purchase and use.
In 1893, Gibier started an in-house journal, the New York Therapeutic Review (renamed the
Bulletin of the Pasteur Institute in 1897), which highlighted the work of the institute and the
clinical efficacy of its products, and also carried advertisements for the NYPI’s offerings. As of
January 1893, the New York Biological and Vaccinal Institute, created as a division of the NYPI,
sold smallpox vaccine as well as glandular extracts prepared according to the Brown-Sequard
method, the product of the French physician Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard’s enthusiasm for
rejuvenation therapy. 61 Additional goods followed, with an array of thirteen products—vaccines,
serums, animal extracts, and other biological preparations—on sale by 1897. Gibier could take
particular satisfaction in diphtheria antitoxin, first developed by Emile Roux at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris and introduced by the New York Pasteur Institute to the United States in 1894.
As Bert Hansen has pointed out, most historical accounts have erroneously attributed the
introduction of diphtheria antitoxin to the New York Department of Health and failed to
recognize the NYPI’s critical pioneering role as the sole provider of antitoxin in the United
States and Canada from the fall of 1894 until early 1895. Gibier noted that between September
1894 and November 1895, the NYPI provided over 11,500 doses of diphtheria anti-toxin, with
another 3500 by February 1896. As part of the confluence of public and private, purchasers of
“Gibier’s antitoxin” included public health authorities in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and
Ontario, a publicly appointed commission in New Orleans, and health officers in the cities of
New Haven, Ashtabula, Cumberland, and Petersburg (Illinois). In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the

25
city health office monitored the results of NYPI-made diphtheria antitoxin use by private
physicians and found a 50% drop in mortality rates, a highly gratifying finding for the NYPI. 62
The NYPI developed other sources of revenue as well. In the early months of 1895,
Gibier offered a series of 15 weekly lecture-demonstrations “intended for those who need
laboratory practice to understand better the literature of the subject.” The course, he promised,
“will be of great advantage to practitioners who are desirous of establishing personal laboratories
of Bacteriology, as many methods which will be taught simplify the ordinary technique to a great
extent.” 63 In 1893, with the new facility at Central Park West, Gibier moved well beyond rabies
vaccination by opening a sanatorium for paying patients that provided treatment for a broad
range of ills, including “nervous affections, alcoholism, drug habits, diabetes, kidney and
pulmonary diseases, rheumatism,” and other non-contagious conditions, as well as the use of the
Brown-Séquard method to treat “Locomotor Ataxia and nervous exhaustion.” 64 In addition to
manufacturing and selling biological products, the NYPI’s Biological and Vaccinal Institute also
added analytic laboratory services in 1896. 65
This wide assortment of activities generated the income for the NYPI’s ambitious
expansion. At the end of 1895, Gibier purchased 200 acres in Suffern, New York, a rural town
just twenty-five miles from New York City, where he planned a massive operation. Gibier
immediately built two barns in order to replace the more haphazard urban options for stabling the
large animals—particularly horses and cows—whose bodies provided the living factories that
produced diphtheria antitoxin, smallpox vaccine, and other products. He also planned a vastly
enlarged sanatorium with three buildings to serve patients in the serene countryside, as a
therapeutic alternative to the nerve-jangling environment of the city. Construction of the new
patient facilities, estimated to cost from $18,000 to $20,000, commenced in February 1898 and

26
finished four months later. The Central Park location closed, but the NYPI maintained an urban
office on West 23 rd Street to receive and evaluate animal bite victims. 66
Gibier’s institutional empire and its intersections with governmental authority indicates
the fluidity between private and public in the management of public health. For individual
patients, rabies constituted a private and most urgent matter of personal health, but the existence
of canine animal control ordinances also indicated recognition of rabies as an issue of public
health. In that context, when private persons such as the Motts or Gibier undertook to provide
rabies vaccination, including free Pasteur treatment for poor patients, they performed a public
function well in line with myriad nineteenth-century traditions of private initiative for public
purposes. When city and state governments paid for their residents’ vaccinations, they implicitly
recognized the public status of rabies as a health problem. In particular, the New York state
legislature’s direct appropriations to the NYPI and assertion of oversight established, in essence,
the integration of the institute into the state’s exercise of public policy, an arrangement that
benefited both Gibier and the residents of New York. 67
The public side of public health: The New York Department of Health and rabies vaccination
For Gibier’s impressive organizational empire, the beginning of the end came in June
1900, with his sudden death in a carriage accident. George Gibier Rambaud, Gibier’s nephew
and the superintendent of the NYPI’s Biological and Vaccinal Institute, succeeded his uncle, but
under vastly reduced circumstances. Gibier had a son in Paris who inherited most of his father’s
estate, including the Suffern facility. 68
Louis Gibier apparently sold off the land and buildings in
Suffern, which left the NYPI with its West 23 rd Street office and rabies vaccination as the
institute’s mainstay. Rambaud failed to manifest Gibier’s combination of ability, motivation,

27
and means, and the NYPI never again attempted the enterprising diversification that had
sustained its rapid growth in the 1890s.
Meanwhile, the New York City Department of Health decided to enter into direct
competition with the NYPI. Hermann M. Biggs, the driving force behind New York’s ambitious
and expansive public health efforts in the 1890s and 1900s, led the way. Already in December
1885, while still on the staff of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Biggs visited Paris to study
Pasteur’s rabies inoculation methods, as part of a cook’s tour of European laboratories he
conducted that winter. He joined the city health department in 1892, as chief inspector of the
newly created Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection. There he immediately
established the health department’s Research Laboratory, and he soon became the department’s
general medical officer. The new laboratory quickly established a superior reputation for its
integration of bacteriological endeavor into public health work, especially after it began to
produce and distribute diphtheria antitoxin in 1895. In 1896, Biggs developed designs upon
rabies vaccination, and he dispatched Anna Wessels Williams to the Pasteur Institute in Paris,
mainly to study techniques for producing streptococcus antitoxin, but also to learn methods for
rabies vaccine production and diagnosis. Williams, a prominent and versatile bacteriologist and
one of the foremost women in American science, had worked with William H. Park at the
Research Laboratory to isolate a strain of diphtheria that led to the development of the New York
City Department of Health’s diphtheria antitoxin. She had already begun to look into rabies in
1895, and she readily took up Biggs’ assignment at Paris. Her research led to new means of
large-scale production of rabies vaccine in 1898, and in 1904, Williams developed techniques for
the rapid diagnosis of rabies through pathological examination of Negri bodies in brain tissue,
which became the definitive means of diagnosing rabies in dead animals for many years

28
thereafter. 69
In its annual reports for 1905 and 1906, the Board of Health vigorously touted the
accomplishments of Williams and other bacteriologists at the Research Laboratory in rabies
diagnosis and treatment. 70
A vastly increased patient load accompanied this expansion of the health department’s
laboratory research and advances in diagnosis. By sending Williams to Paris, Biggs intended to
take a first step toward challenging the New York Pasteur Institute’s monopoly over rabies
vaccination. As he wrote to Park in July 1896, “I told Dr. Williams to go over the rabies work
very carefully and take home some virus. I think we must take this up quietly and when
everything is prepared to administer treatment, advise the Health Board. It will then be done.
Say nothing now.” 71 In essence, Biggs hoped to launch an institutional coup and offer rabies
vaccination as a fait accompli, which the Board would have to support before any complaints
could arise from Gibier’s outfit.
Two years later, in the fall of 1898, the Board of Health authorized the Division of
Bacteriology to provide rabies treatment, but the pace of work grew slowly. In 1900, the health
department vaccinated or distributed vaccine to just 28 dog bite victims. Five years later,
however, that figure surpassed a hundred, and by 1907, it reached 600. On average, between
1908 and 1913, the department delivered vaccine to over nine hundred patients a year. City
residents received free treatment, while animal bite victims from upstate New York or other parts
of the country were usually charged $50, with reduced rates for those in need. Even the standard
fee fell well below the NYPI’s bill for paying patients, which was set in 1899 at $200, including
room and board. 72
Meanwhile, the Board’s capacity to handle and deal with animals increased significantly
with the deployment of veterinarians to inspect cows and milk production, and to check horses

29
for glanders, a deadly equine respiratory disease that could also infect humans. Cows and horses
were essential to the urban economy as sources of food and transportation, and public health
officials in New York paid close attention to dairy and stable inspection. By 1907, animal work
had increased to the point that “animal inspection” now constituted a distinct category of the
Sanitary Bureau’s functions. Although dairies and stables remained its primary focus, the health
department’s corps of veterinarians also examined dogs involved in dog bite complaints and
other dogs suspected of having rabies. 73 Canine examinations soon increased dramatically. In
1907, the department’s veterinarians examined some 1100 dogs; that number jumped to over
4600 in the following year, and the veterinary corps continued to examine thousands of dogs
annually in the period leading up to World War I. 74
During the 1900s, the New York health department used its newly assertive mechanisms
for rabies prevention and vaccination to build its prestige in the field and to make significant
inroads into the Pasteur Institute’s previously exclusive territory. Although the NYPI continued
for some time to maintain its lead in numbers of patients treated, in 1906, the Department of
Health could compare favorably its 340 patients vaccinated to some 450 or so at the NYPI, and
also boast similar success rates. 75 An early signal of the NYPI’s decline in status appeared in the
spring of 1901, when the state assembly passed a bill “making it permissive instead of mandatory
for Overseers of the Poor in the various counties to send hydrophobia patients to the Pasteur
Institute in New York City.” Although the proposal did not specifically name the Department of
Health as an alternative source of treatment, the new wording suggested official recognition of
the possibility. The final version of the bill became law in July. 76 Other developments also
testified to growing competition between the health department and the NYPI. In addition to
vying for patients, for example, both institutions also examined animal brain tissue in order to

30
diagnose rabies, and access to animal bodies and body parts sometimes became a point of
contention. 77 On other occasions, an informal division of labor ensued, in which, for example,
the Pasteur Institute took the patient while the health department ended up with the dog’s
corpse. 78 Competition for live patients rarely erupted in the open, but one such case made
headlines. In May 1907, William Cooper Procter, president of the Procter & Gamble Soap
Company, suffered a bite while trying to separate two of his setters, and he subsequently
discovered that rabies had infected nearly every dog in his kennel. Newspapers across the
country reported the soap magnate’s dire plight (“Millionaire in Race Against Hydrophobia”!
“Millionaire in Death Race”! “Mad Dog Bites Millionaire”!) and his rushed departure for the
New York Pasteur Institute. 79
When Procter instead took treatment from Daniel W. Poor and
William H. Park at the Department of Health, the NYPI cried foul and accused the health
department of poaching its patient. “All arrangements had been made” to treat Procter,
complained an incensed Rambaud. Physicians at the NYPI, he continued, waited two days for
Procter to arrive when “we received a tip that our patient had fallen into the hands of the
physicians of the Health Department.”
Rambaud then asserted an exclusive right on the part of the NYPI to treat out-of-town
patients and argued that the Department of Health should limit itself to taking care of the city.
Park responded that his agency had supplied serum or vaccine to patients “wherever they come
from” for over a decade. Those who needed rabies vaccination could expect it free of charge if
they were New York City residents, “whether they be millionaires or paupers,” and for $50 if
they arrived from elsewhere. Health commissioner Thomas Darlington added, “If anyone comes
to us for treatment, no matter who he is, rich or poor, as a matter of human kindness, we treat

31
them all alike. Of course we charge for out-of-town patients; we are compelled to by law.”
When told of the Pasteur Institute’s protest, he added, “I don’t know anything about it, and I care
less.” 80 A major rabies outbreak in 1907-08 likely kept rabies vaccination at both the New York
Pasteur Institute and the Department of Health’s Research Laboratory running at full capacity
and lessened the economic pressures on the NYPI. As the New York Tribune reported in May
1908, “Dr. Park’s department and the Pasteur Institute have been overrun with persons who have
been bitten by dogs, horses and rats.” 81
In other years, however, the health department’s
growing patient load must have seriously affected the Pasteur Institute’s income. Moreover, the
development in the early twentieth century of prepared injections with a prolonged shelf life
made it possible for the health department to distribute preventive hydrophobia treatment by mail
to private physicians, hospitals, and public health boards. The minutes of the Board of Health
indicate dozens of such cases in 1908 alone. 82
With that technical advancement well in place, in
1909, the New York state health commissioner recommended the establishment of a regularized,
state-wide system for distributing the shots, and New York City’s health department made clear
its readiness for the task. 83 A decade earlier, Americans who wanted to undergo Pasteur
treatment had to travel to one of perhaps three or so facilities around the country, including the
NYPI. Now they could receive rabies vaccination at their own doctors’ offices, or at local
institutions, and bypass the New York Pasteur Institute entirely. 84
Occasionally, the NYPI fought prevailing trends by promising specialized products, such
as a new, stronger rabies vaccine from Paris that required fewer inoculations and a shorter course
of treatment. 85
But with its monopoly broken, the single-purpose clinic that the NYPI had
become had no way to remain viable in the long term. Lack of attentiveness on Rambaud’s part

32
likely did not help matters. For an extended period in the mid-1900s, he was absent much of the
time, and physician William L. Wheeler took over the daily duties of administering treatment
and fielding press inquiries. 86
In 1911, Rambaud also suffered serious injuries in an auto
accident and faced a difficult recovery. 87
Two years later, he became embroiled in medical
controversy when he agreed to become director of the Friedmann Institute, a clinic founded in
New York City by a German researcher, Friedrich Franz Friedmann, who claimed to be able to
cure tuberculosis with a serum derived from bacterial cultures in turtles. Medical observers had
already denounced Friedmann as “unscientific” and even a “fakir,” but Rambaud agreed to take
charge of the institute in the interests of a full scientific evaluation. The Board of Health,
however, shut down Friedmann’s facility shortly thereafter, and the County Medical Society
considered disciplinary action against Rambaud and three other physicians, although it seems to
have tabled the matter. 88
Then with the start of World War I, the French-born Rambaud, who led
a trans-Atlantic life split between New York City and Paris, increasingly turned toward
mobilizing physicians for the front. 89 Finally, in September 1918, the New York Pasteur
Institute closed its doors for good, and Rambaud moved to France permanently after the end of
the war. 90
Conclusion
Rambaud’s peregrinations and gyrations should not obscure the more basic structural
conditions behind the NYPI’s slow decline. As the New York Times noted in its epitaph for the
institute, the spread of Pasteur treatment to general hospital practice had “considerably limited”
the NYPI’s patient base. With its exclusive franchise gone, and Rambaud either unable or
uninterested in adapting to the changed medical and institutional environment at the confluence

33
of laboratory science and public health in the 1910s, the New York Pasteur Institute no longer
had anything distinctive or vital to offer to New York medicine.
This historical account of rabies vaccination in New York City has paid close attention to
reconstructing convoluted institutional and personal histories from limited sources, and to
exploring the problems of laboratory technique, knowledge transfer, and the dissemination of the
Pasteurian program that concerns historians of science and medicine. The histories of the
American Pasteur Institute, the New York Pasteur Institute, and the New York City Department
of Health also speak to the private and public dimensions of health care provision, and the
tangled conformations that simultaneously define and dissolve the border between public and
private. On the one hand, one could read this history in teleological terms, as a story about the
gradual rise and ultimate triumph of a bureaucratized, expert-led state over its less deserving
predecessors in the private, voluntary sector. On the other hand, these three institutional
histories, taken in their own specific historical moments, also speak to the complexities and
inadequacies of the public-private distinction itself, when overlapping spheres of public and
private have so frequently defined American social life. When the American Pasteur Institute
and New York Pasteur Institute offered free rabies vaccination, they addressed a recognized
matter of public concern, as part of a long tradition of charitable social welfare provision. When
local and state governments paid for the NYPI’s services, they secured the public welfare by
private means. When the New York City Department of Health supplied or sold preventive
hydrophobia treatment to physicians or hospitals, it too blurred the border of public and private.
Americans have frequently sought a firm distinction between public and private in order
to dictate and validate courses of action that conform to particular ideological convictions. Their
actual policy practices have been syncretic, however, precisely because people perceive

34
themselves simultaneously as autonomous individuals and as interdependent members of society,
and human needs, desires, and experiences defy rigid categorization as either wholly public or
wholly private. In 1969, radical feminist Carol Hanisch made the point most succinctly when
she declared the personal to be political. Our tools of social and political analysis, however,
have yet to take full advantage of that insight. Historical accounts of everyday public policy,
whether they involve rabies vaccination, canine animal control, or the myriad other organized
tasks that undergird daily life, have much to add to our understanding of the public-private
distinction as a set of lived experiences and practices.

35
1. Jessica Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association,
State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850-1920,” Journal of
American History 98 (March 2012): 998-1024.
2. [need some citations: Starr on the medical profession; Novak on nuisance and public
health; Dewey on the definition of the public; maybe McGerr on progressivism and the public
stake in private conflicts]
3. See Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State.”
4. Bert Hansen, “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about
a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress,” American
Historical Review 103 (April 1998): 373-418.
5. “Returning from Pasteur,” NYT, 3 January 1886, p. 1; “A Pasteur Hospital for
Hydrophobia Patients,” BDE, 2 January 1886, p. 2.
6. “Obituary: Alexander B. Mott, M.D.,” NYT, 13 August 1889, p. 2; “Dr. Valentine
Mott Dies Suddenly at 65,” NYT, 20 June 1918, p. 13. For some of the highlights in the elder
Valentine Mott’s career, see Courtney R. Hall, “The Rise of Professional Surgery in the United
States: 1800-1865,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 26 (1952): 242, 245-48, and 251.
7. “For the Cure of Rabies,” BDE, 3 January 1886, p. 1; “Following Pasteur’s Lead,
NYH, 3 January 1886, p. 7; “Owners Seeking for Lost Pets,” NYTr, 3 January 1886, p. 3; “A
Pasteur Institute for New York,” NYTr, 5 January 1886, p. 2; “A Pasteur Institute Incorporated,”
NYT, 5 January 1886, p. 1.
8. “Pasteur’s Great Discovery,” Daily News (San Diego, Calif.), 4 January 1886, p. 2;
“General News,” Idaho Avalanche (Silver City), 16 January 1886, p. 2.

36
9. “Dr. Alex F. Liautard Dead,” NYT, 23 April 1918, p. 13; “Death of Ex-Coroner M. J.
B. Messemer,” NYT, 2 March 1894, p. 1; “Police Find Mrs. de Plasse,” NYT, 25 February 1898,
p. 5 (on Louis de Plasse); “French Guests Welcomed,” NYT, 27 October 1886, p. 5 (on Charles
Villa); “A Jolly Dinner Party,” NYT, 8 January 1887, p. 5 (on Charles Villa); “Charles
Nirdlinger,” NYT, 14 May 1940, p. 30. Nirdlinger achieved his greatest success as a playwright
and writer in the 1900s and 1910s, but some evidence of his earlier presence in New York City’s
literary and theatrical life appears in “The ‘Rider and Driver,’” NYT, 17 December 1892, p. 8;
and Charles Frederic Nirdlinger, Masques and Mummurs: Essays of the Theatre of Here and
Now (New York: The Dewitt Publishing House, 1899). The efforts of Adolph Corbett and other
concert hall owners to exempt venues that only played orchestral music from city laws regulating
amusement halls perhaps indicates efforts to change the social status of such establishments.
“Concert Hall Licenses,” NYT, 11 July 1886, p. 5. In 1887, however, the New York Times
described Corbett’s concert hall, the Bijou on W. 14 th Street, as “a notorious dive.” “Under
Three Charges,” NYT, 6 February 1887, p. 3. I am not absolutely certain that the Charles Villa,
Charles F. Nirdlinger, and Adolph Corbett that I have identified here are the same individuals as
named in the incorporation of the American Pasteur Institute, but I have not been able to find any
other possible candidates. The association of elite medical professionals with the owner of “a
notorious dive” should not surprise readers, however, given historical findings about male
sociability and American urban life during the late nineteenth century, including the frequency
with which supposedly respectable men visited prostitutes, as well as the proliferation of roughedged
male spaces of entertainment, such as animal-fighting dens and bare-fisted prize-fighting
venues, whose audiences crossed class lines. [citations—Freedman and d’Emilio; Buffet mss.;
Gorn on bare-knuckle fighting]

37
10. American Pasteur Institute Articles of Incorporation quoted in “Current Events,”
BDE, 5 January 1886, p. 2.
11. “To Study Hydrophobia,” NYH, 5 January 1886, p. 7; and, for the quotation, “What
the Doctors Say,” NYH, 13 January 1886, p. 3.
12. “What the Doctors Say,” NYH, 13 January 1886, p. 3; “Foreign Fact and Comment,”
BDE, 21 March 1886, p. 15; “Foreign Fact and Comment,” BDE, 28 March 1886, p. 10;
“Against Hydrophobia,” NYH, 2 April 1886, p. 9.
13. Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995), chs. 7-8, esp. pp. 185, 189-91, and 213-15; Louis Pasteur, “Méthode
pour Prévenir la Rage après Morsure,” reprinted in Oeuvres de Pasteur, ed. Pasteur Vallery-
Radot, vol. 6 (Paris: Masson et Cie., 1933), 603-10.
14. Excerpts from Valentine Mott’s letter of 7 April 1886 published in “At Pasteur’s
Laboratory,” NYH, 9 May 1886, p. 21.
15. “To Study Hydrophobia,” NYH, 5 January 1886, p. 7; “Dr. Mott Returns from
Pasteur,” NYH, 17 May 1886, p. 9. Mott later reported that the rabbit died nine days after
inoculation, and he kept the corpse on ice until his ship docked in New York City the next day,
on May 16. That timing suggests that the ship left Paris on May 6, a month after Mott’s arrival
in Paris. Valentine Mott, Rabies and How to Prevent It: A Paper Read before the American
Social Science Association, Saratoga, 8 September 1886 (Boston: Geo. E. Crosby & Co., 1887),
14. Mott’s letter to his father also indicated a planned side trip to Constantinople, which if it
took place, meant he spent even less time at Pasteur’s laboratory. Excerpts from Valentine
Mott’s letter of 7 April 1886 published in “At Pasteur’s Laboratory,” NYH, 9 May 1886, p. 21.
16. [need a citation here—Latour? other?]

38
17. Louis Pasteur to Dr. Chautemps (Vice-President, Paris Municipal Council), 22 July
1886, in Pasteur Vallery-Radot, ed., Correspondance de Pasteur 1840-1895, vol. 4 (Paris:
Flammarion, 1951), 76, translations to English by the author.
18. Geison, 219-20 and 223-26. [may also want to cite the relevant material from the
NYMJ]
19. “Rabbits with the Rabies” Macon Telegraph (Georgia), 22 May 1886, p. 3, story
reprinted from the New York Star.
20. “Inoculation: Money Needed to Develop Pasteur’s Work in America,” St. Louis
Globe-Democrat, 24 May 1886, p. 5, story reprinted from the New York Evening Post.
21. “The Pasteur Hospital,” NYH, 29 May 1886, p. 9.
22. “Protection from Rabies,” NYTr, 4 June 1886, p. 2. [need some documentation re.
the Motts’ likely laboratory experience]
23. “Pasteur’s Method in New York,” NYH, 29 June 1886; “From Pasteur’s Rabbit,”
NYH, 6 July 1886; [Untitled], BDE, 6 July 1886, p. 2; “The Pasteur Method: It Is Practiced by
Dr. Valentine Mott in New York City,” Galveston Daily News (Texas), 7 July 1886, p. 1;
“America’s Pasteur,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 10 July 1886, p. 8, article reprinted from
the New York Journal; “Gotham Gossip,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 12 July 1886, p. 9.
The quotation is from the Picayune’s 12 July article.
24. “Dr. Newell Is Not Dissatisfied,” NYTr, 14 July 1886, p. 5; “In the Shadow of
Death,” NYH, 17 July 1886 p. 3.
25. “Pasteur’s Method,” Kansas City Star, 5 July 1886, p. 1; [untitled], “Trying Pasteur’s
Method,” Daily News (San Jose), 6 July 1886, p. 1; “For the Prevention of Rabies,” Cleveland
Plain Dealer, 7 July 1886, p. 6; Trenton Times (New Jersey), 8 July 1886, p. 5, “America’s

39
Pasteur,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 10 July 1886, p. 8, article reprinted from the New York
Journal; “Pasteur in America,” Kalamazoo Gazette (Michigan), 11 July 1886, p. 8;
“Hydrophobia: The Pasteur Treatment on the Jersey City Boy Bitten by a Mad Dog,” Macon
Telegraph (Georgia), 20 July 1886, p. 4, and also an identical account in the Columbus Daily
Enquirer (Georgia), 20 July 1886, p. 1; “New York Notes,” Weekly Detroit Free Press, 24 July
1886, p. 4.
26. “New York Notes,” Weekly Detroit Free Press, 5 June 1886, p. 7.
27. “Foreign Fact and Comment,” BDE, 6 June 1886, p. 7; “Little Faith in Pasteur,”
Boston Daily Advertiser, 7 July 1886, p. 1.
28. “Dr. Mott’s Regard for the Public,” NYTr, 24 August 1886, p. 8. See also
“According to Pasteur’s Method,” NYH, 23 August 1886, p. 6.
29. Valentine Mott, Rabies and How to Prevent It, 14.
30. “Social Scientists,” NYH, 9 September 1886, p. 3; [untitled], Springfield Republic
(Mass.), 9 September 1886, p. 8. The Springfield Republic also reproduced the full text of
Mott’s address several weeks later, but drew no special attention to the American Pasteur
Institute’s most recent patients. “Rabies and Its Prevention,” Springfield Republic (Mass.), 29
October 1886, p. 7.
31. “According to Pasteur’s Method,” NYH, 2 December 1886, p. 9; “Hydrophobia:
Story of Three Mississippi Children Bitten by a Mad Dog,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, 6
December 1886, p. 3; “Another Case for Pasteur,” NYTrib, 5 January 1887, p. 1. In February
1887, an article in the New York Herald on a recent human death from rabies identified
Valentine Mott as president of the API, which suggests some kind of institutional persistence.
“Hydrophobia Clearly Proven,” NYH, 12 February 1877, p. 3. In addition, an obituary for

40
Alexander B. Mott indicated that the API lasted for a total of two years. The author noted of the
American Pasteur Institute, “The experiment was not a success, and after two years of careful
trial it was abandoned.” “Alexander B. Mott Dead,” NYH, 13 August 1889, p. 5. In 1890,
Valentine Mott claimed he had successfully inoculated about twenty patients against rabies, but I
have not found any other evidence to confirm any cases of Pasteur treatment at the American
Pasteur Institute beyond the end of 1886. “Saved by the Virus,” Chicago Herald, 16 November
1890, p. 27.
32. “Following Pasteur’s Methods,” NYT, 19 February 1890, p. 2; “A Pasteur Institute,”
NYTr, 19 Feb. 1890, p. 4.
33. “Pasteur Institute,” BDE, 13 July 1890, p. 19; “Dr. Gibier’s Work,” NYT, 16 October
1890, p. 8; “Work of the New York Pasteur Institute,” NYTr, 20 October 1890, p. 7.
34. Bert Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass
Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers
University Press, 2009).
35. Paul Gibier, Recherches Expérimentales sur la Rage et sur son Traitement (Paris: A.
Parent, 1884).
36. Ibid, quotation on 42.
37. Biographical information on Gibier has been drawn from “Gibier, Paul,”
Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, ed. M. Prevost, Roman D’Amat, and H. Tribout de
Morembert, vol. 15 (Paris: Librairie Leouzey et Ané, 1982), 1458; Hansen, Picturing Medical
Progress, 104-05; “Following Pasteur’s Methods,” NYH, 19 February 1890, p. 2; “Dr. Gibier
Killed in Runaway Accident,” NYT, 11 June 1900, p. 1; “Dr. Paul Gibier,” British Medical
Journal, 14 July 1900, pp. 130-31; Gibier’s file in the papers of the Legion of Honor at the

41
French National Archives, available on-line via the Léonore database, Le Fonds de la Légion
d’Honneur aux Archives Nationales, www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/leonore/leonore.htm
(Mary 2012); and “Yellow Fever Microbes,” NYT, 16 October 1888, p. 3. On Gibier’s erroneous
claim to have identified the microbial cause of yellow fever, see “The Microbe of Yellow
Fever,” British Medical Journal, 9 February 1889, 319; and “Destructive Research,” British
Medical Journal, 11 January 1890, 93. Gibier was far from alone in his failure: as Ilana Löwy
has noted, “There were a dozen or so triumphant announcements of the isolation of the ‘yellow
fever germ’ in the 1880s and 1890s,” none of which withstood withering scientific critiques.
Löwy, “Yellow Fever in Rio de Janeiro and the Pasteur Institute Mission (1901-1905): The
Transfer of Science to the Periphery,” Medical History 34 (1990): 144-163, on 144. [need to fix
this footnote—some of it applies to earlier paragraphs]
38. John Strachan, “The Pasteurization of Algeria?” French History 20:3 (2006): 260-75,
on 263. See also Anne Marie Moulin, “Patriarchal Science: The Network of the Overseas
Pasteur Institutes,” in Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and
European Expansion, ed. Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne Marie Moulin (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 307-22, on 310-11.
39. [maybe cite the example of the Pasteur Institute in Palestine here? Or other
examples?]
40. [Difficult, at least, as far as sources readily available in the U.S. are concerned. At
some point soon, I will have to contact the Archive de l’Institut Pasteur directly and, possibly,
travel to Paris to use materials there. If possible, I will try to learn more about Valentine Mott’s
1886 trip, as well as Gibier’s connections to Pasteur.]

42
41. See, for example, the large array of letters between Bouley and Pasteur in Pasteur
Vallery-Radot, ed., Correspondance de Pasteur 1840-1895, vol. 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1951).
42. The entry on Gibier in the Dictionnaire de Biographie Française (Dictionary of
French Biography) suggests that “The publication of Le spiritisme…would have forced Gibier
to leave the Museum and then emigrate to America, where he could juggle these two activities,”
namely medicine and spiritualism, but then notes that Pasteur “charged him with studying…the
‘microscopic agents’ of yellow fever.” [How best to translate “l’aurait obliger” in this context—
could have or would have?] “Gibier, Paul,” Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, vol. 15,
1458. In a later work, Gibier admitted “the general disfavor with which he met among his
superiors and colleagues” upon the publication of Le spiritisme in 1887. Paul Gibier, Psychism:
Analysis of Things Existing, 3 rd ed. (New York: Bulletin Publishing Company, 1899), 8. At the
time of his death, the British Medical Journal reported that Gibier “was a voluminous writer,”
and that “the Banner of Light says that by the ‘transition’ of Dr. Gibier[,] spiritualism has lost
one of its truest friends.” “Dr. Paul Gibier,” British Medical Journal, 14 July 1900, p. 131.
43. “Pasteur Building Dedicated,” NYT, 11 October 1893, p. 9; “Dr. Gibier Killed in
Runaway Accident,” NYT, 11 June 1900, p. 1. [need to incorporate other sources]
44. See, respectively, “Following Pastuer’s Methods,” NYH, 19 February 1890, p. 2; “To
Be New York’s Pasteur,” NYH, 19 February 1890, p. 8; “Pasteur Hospital Opened,” Worcester
Daily Spy (Mass.), 19 February 1890, p. 3; “To Treat Hydrophobia,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 20
February 1890, p. 4; “The Gossip of Gotham. Paul Gibier, the American Pasteur and His New
Institute,” Knoxville Journal (Tenn.), 10 March 1890, p. 13.

43
45. “Pasteur Building Dedicated,” NYT, 11 October 1893, p. 9; “An Hour with Paul
Gibier,” NYT, 23 December 1893, p. 2. [somewhere need to find the later stories that said initial
funding came in part from Pasteur]
46. “The Gossip of Gotham. Paul Gibier, the American Pasteur and His New Institute,”
Knoxville Journal (Tenn.), 10 March 1890, p. 13.
47. Paul Gibier, “Pasteur,” New York Therapeutic Review 4 (January 1896): 1-4, on p. 1,
in the footnote. [I still need to check Rambaud’s tribute to Gibier, once I gain access to the
Bulletin of the Pasteur Institute, 1897-1900.]
48. Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998; orig. published Flammarion, 1994), 483-91, quotation on 490.
49. Paul Gibier, Les Découvertes Récentes sur les Êtres Microscopiques et Leur
Application à l'Agriculture (1883) [need to get the cover page]; Gibier, Étude sur le Choléra
d’après un Rapport Présenté à M. le Ministre de l’Intérieur sur l’Épidémie de 1884 de
l’Arrondissement de Brignoles (Var.) (Paris: Asselin et Houzeau, 1884); Gibier, Recherches
Expérimentales sur la Rage et sur son Traitement (Paris, 1884); Gibier, Etiología y tratamiento
de la Fiebre Amarilla (La Habana, 1888) [15 pp.—try to get a full copy via ILL].
The importance of tacit knowledge to the process and the ease with which Gibier
introduced rabies vaccination to New York City implies direct experience at Pasteur’s
laboratory. It is not impossible, however, that he taught himself the technique, given his
extensive experience with bacteriological methods and the successes of at least some selftrained,
self-declared “Pasteurians” around the world. [cite Löwy, others on self-trained
bacteriologists in Latin America and elsewhere] [to substantiate further the Gibier-Pasteur link
or lack thereof: need to check Pasteur, Correspondance, vol. 3; Pasteur, Oeuvres, vol. 6; and the

44
éloge in Bulletin of the Pasteur Institute before contacting the archives of l’Institut Pasteur and
attempting research in Paris; can also try Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences in 1880s,
for anything by Gibier]
50. Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 313.
51. Jean-Pierre Dedet, Les Instituts Pasteur d’Outre-Mer: Cent vingt ans de
microbiologie françaises dans le monde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 10. On other Pasteur
Institutes that operated without sanction from Paris, see Moulin, “Patriarchal Science,” 316; and
Nadav Davidovitch and Rakefet Zalashik, “Pasteur in Palestine: The Politics of the Laboratory,”
Science in Context 23 (2010): 401-25, esp. 404 and 421.
52. [need to dig up the citation—e.g., NYTr, 7/4/1891, p. 7] By 1899, the cost had risen
to $200, including room and board for fifteen days. “April Meeting of the Massachusetts
Association of Boards of Health—Anti-Rabic Institutions,” Journal of the Massachusetts
Association of Boards of Health 9 (July 1899): 46-47, on 46.
53. “Badly Bitten By a Bloodhound,” NYTr, 15 June 1890, p. 13; “Moving Day for
Inoculated Animals,” NYTr, 9 June 1893, p. 11. In its report on the move to the new building,
the New York Tribune also noted that “M. Pasteur has been kept well informed of the progress of
the work in the United States, and is gratified with the establishment of a permanent home in
which hydrophobia patients in America will be treated.” The new facility had an official
inauguration and opening in October: “Pasteur Building Dedicated,” NYT, 11 October 1893, p. 9.
[note: not clear if the wealthy donor came through in the end; later reports attributed the new
building to Gibier’s personal funds plus the leftover subscription from the Newark boys]
54. “To Treat New Jersey Patients Free,” NYTr, 4 March 1891, p. 3.
55. [BDE, 7/18/1895, p. 10]

45
56. See, for example, “Jersey City to Pay the Bill,” NYT, 24 September 1901, p. 7, which
relates how Jersey City’s mayor decided that two children in need of rabies vaccination should
be covered at public expense, “as the children were injured in the public streets.”
57. I have provided a more extensive discussion of nineteenth-century governance and
the public-private relationship in Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State.”
58. For example, in Russia in 1886, the Kharkov Medical Society sent physicians to
Paris to learn Pasteur’s rabies vaccination techniques and then established a Pasteur Institute in
Kharkov the following year. In 1895, the Kharkov Pasteur Institute began to produce diphtheria
anti-toxin, and it manufactured a wide range of other vaccines and serums by the 1900s. S. S.
Diachenko, “K 100-letiyu so dnya organizatsii Pasterovskogo Privivnogo Instituta i
Bakteriologicheskoy Stantsii v g. Kharkova” (“The hundredth anniversary of the founding of the
Pasteur Vaccination Institute and Bacteriological Station in the city of Kharkov”), Vrachebnoe
delo [no volume number] (1989): 118-20. Similarly, in Palestine, Karl Böhm’s Pasteur Institute
for Health, Medicine, and Biology carried out an array of bacteriological and educational
activities related to public health. Davidovitch and Zalashik, 401-25, on 411-12.
59. “For a Lymph Hospital. A Bacteriological Institute Here,” NYTr, 21 December
1890, p. 4. Despite the name change, observers and contemporaries, including Gibier, continued
to refer to the organization as the New York Pasteur Institute.
60. On the synergies between Pasteur’s and Koch’s approaches to bacteriology and
immunization, see Ulrike Klöppel, “Enacting Cultural Boundaries in French and German
Diphtheria Serum Research,” Science in Context 21 (2008): 161-80.
61. See the advertisements in New York Therapeutic Review 1 (January 1893), on the
reverse side of the cover page and on p. viii. On the history of the NYPI and Brown-Séquard’s

46
therapies, see Merriley Borell, “Brown-Séquard’s Organotherapy and its Appearance in America
at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (Fall 1976): 309-
20. As dubious as most present-day observers find turn-of-the-century glandular therapies, they
were widespread in their day and played an important role in the development of hormone
research. [citation? maybe on Metchnikoff?]
62. Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress, 106-07; [Paul Gibier], “The Treatment of
Diphtheria with the Anti-Toxine [sic] Made at the New York Pasteur Institute, with Reports of
Cases,” New York Therapeutic Review 3 (March 1895): 1-10; [Paul Gibier], “Further Notes
Upon the Treatment of Diphtheria with the Antitoxin Made at the New York Pasteur Institute,
with Reports of Cases,” New York Therapeutic Review 3 (June 1895): 29-38; “A Local Report on
Antitoxin,” New York Therapeutic Review 4 (December 1896): 93.
63. Course advertisement in the New York Therapeutic Review 2 (December 1894): 76.
64. Advertisement for the “Central Park Sanatorium” in New York Therapeutic Review 2
(January 1894), on the back of the cover page and p. i.
65. Advertisement for the “Biological & Analytical Laboratory,” New York Therapeutic
Review 4 (January 1896): iii. Locomotor Ataxia was a complication from syphilis.
66. Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress, 107-08; “Three More Sanitariums,” NYTr, 27
December 1895, p. 12; “To Remove the Pasteur Institute,” NYTr, 18 February 1898, p. 16;
“Pasteur Institute’s Removal,” NYT, 7 June 1898, p. 12; “Pasteur Institute’s New Home,” NYTr,
7 June 1898, p. 5. [somewhere I have article on the animal stabling issue, including the donor
who granted Gibier free stabling—need to find]

47
67. [need to cite Hartog, Novak; maybe also Foucault on biopower and oversight over
life as the most elemental characteristic of state power and its origins; perhaps cite some of the
public health literature on American colonial power as well]
68. For a copy of Gibier’s will, see Folder, “Pasteur—US Institute: New York—Paul
Gibier,” Pasteur Foundation (U.S.), New York, NY. The Pasteur Foundation in New York City
is a fund-raising arm of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and shares no direct institutional lineage with
Gibier’s New York Pasteur Institute.
69. “Dr. Biggs to Visit Pasteur,” NYT, 10 December 1885, p. 3; C.-E. A. Winslow, The
Life of Hermann M. Biggs, Physician and Statesman of the Public Health (Philadelphia: Lee &
Febiger, 1929), 69-70; and Wade W. Oliver, The Man Who Lived for Tomorrow: A Biography
of William Hallock Park, M.D. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1941), 150. For additional
biographical information on Williams, consult the website of the National Library of Medicine:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_331.html (May
2010); and “Experts in Research: Women Doing Important Work in Study of Medicine,”
Washington Post, 15 November 1908, p. E11. [need also to cite Evelynn Hammonds on the
Dept. of Health and diphtheria antitoxin] [need to note how DoH cited 90% accuracy or better in
diagnosis of rabies via Negri bodies, even though CDC now finds an accuracy rate closer to
50%]
70. Annual Report of the Board of Health…1905, vol. II (New York: Martin B. Brown
Company, Printers and Stationers, 1906); and Annual Report of the Board of Health…1906, vol.
II (New York: Martin B. Brown Company, Printers and Stationers, 1907).
71. Hermann M. Biggs to William H. Park, 19 July 1896, full text of the letter
reproduced in Oliver, 149-50.

48
72. Oliver, 173; “To Treat Hydrophobia Cases,” NYT, 10 March 1898, p. 12; and Annual
Report of the Board of Health…1913 (New York City, 1914), 102. [best citation for the DoH
fee structure beyond endless citations from Board of Health minutes for 1908? treatment costs
variously reported as either $50 or $25: “Storm Over Procter. Pasteur Men Indignant,” NYTr, 5
May 1907, p. 1; “Rabies Killed Marsh,” NYTr, 22 May 1908, p. 1. “Again that Wave of Revolt
Against City Dogs,” NYTr, 31 May 1908, p. B2 reports definitively that Pasteur institutes
generally charged $100-150, whereas the DoH charged just $25 for vaccine by mail.].
73. Annual Report of the Board of Health…1907 (New York: Martin B. Brown
Company, Printers and Stationers, 1908), 50-52; and Annual Report of the Board of
Health…1909 (New York: M. B. Brown Printing & Binding Co., 1911), 62.
74. Annual Report of the Board of Health…1907, 51, for statistics on dogs examined in
1907; and Report of the Board of Health…1910 and 1911 (New York City, 1912), 63, for
statistics on dogs examined for the years from 1908 to 1911. For data on subsequent years, see
the board’s annual reports for the years from 1912 to 1917.
75. “Has Rabic Antitoxin,” NYTr, 14 July 1907, 1. The NYPI reported no patient deaths,
while the Department of Health reported a single death and a mortality rate of 0.3%.
76. “Bills Passed at Albany,” NYT, 2 April 1901, p. 5; “Laws of New York. By
Authority,” BDE 20 July 1901, p. 7.
77. “Two Claimants for Dog’s Body,” NYTr, 28 August 1907, p. 3.
78. “Fights Dog on Stairway,” NYTr, 21 August 1911, p. 1; “Chokes Dog to Death after
a Long Battle,” NYTr, 26 March 1912, p. 1.
79. “Millionaire in Race Against Hydrophobia,” Baltimore American, 4 May 1907, p. 1;
“Millionaire in Death Race,” Columbus Enquirer-Sun (Georgia), 7 May 1907, p. 7; “Mad Dog

49
Bites Millionaire,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4 May 1907, p. 1. See also “Treat Procter Here,”
NYTr, 4 May 1907, p. 1; “Soap Magnate Fears Rabies,” Kansas City Star, 3 May 1907, p. 3;
“Proctor Bitten by Mad Dog,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 4 May 1907, p. 4; and
“Treatment for Dog Bite,” Morning Oregonian (Portland), 4 May 1907, p. 1. Other papers told a
counter-story, in which Proctor was in town for business and laughed off reports of his rabiesinspired
flight from Cincinnati. “Mr. Procter Hasn’t Rabies,” NYT, 4 May 1907, p. 9; “Says Dog
Is Innocent,” Fort Worth Telegram, 5 May 1907, p. 15. [check DoH annual reports—I think
they may make explicit mention of Procter, which would confirm the story; otherwise, there’s
also NYTr’s allegation that Procter arrived three days earlier and was undertaking treatment in
secret and protecting his privacy]
80. “Storm Over Procter. Pasteur Men Indignant,” NYTr, 5 May 1907, p. 1. The health
department pronounced Procter out of danger three days later. “Mr. Procter Out of Danger,”
NYTr, 8 May 1907, p. 6. Although he was in New York City no more than a week (the Tribune
reported in its May 4 story that he had arrived in secret three days earlier), by 1907, wellestablished
methods for the preservation of the injections’ strength meant that the Department of
Health could have easily sent him home with the remaining series of inoculations.
81. “City Fighting Rabies,” NYTr, 23 May 1908, p. 3.
82. See Minutes, Board of Health, 1908 FF, 1-8-08 to 7-8-08, and Minutes of the Board
of Health 1908 GG, 7-16-1908 to 12-30-1908, Municipal Archives, New York, NY.
83. “Public Health School,” NYTr, 20 February 1909, p. 2. [need to check when DoH
first starting mailing the injections; NYTr notes such a case in May 1905 (5/22/1905, p. 8)]
84. In the spring of 1899, a committee of the Massachusetts Association of Boards of
Health looked into the availability of rabies vaccination in the United States and found just three

50
providers: the NYPI, Antonio Lagorio’s Pasteur Institute in Chicago, and a Pasteur Institute at
Baltimore’s City Hospital. Although the New York Department of Health had authorized
departmental provision of rabies vaccination, apparently the program was not yet operational,
and Hermann Biggs passed the Massachusetts inquiry along to the NYPI. “Anti-Rabic
Institutions,” Journal of the Massachusetts Association of Boards of Health 9 (July 1899): 46-47.
85. “New Serum to Prevent Rabies,” NYTr, 20 June 1908, p. 4; “First Use of New Rabies
Serum,” NYTr, 24 June 1908, p. 5.
86. For much of the period from 1905 to 1907, Wheeler seemed to conduct most of the
daily work of the NYPI and to act as the institute’s main public face. “Race for Boy’s Life,”
NYTr, 14 July 1907, p. 1 identified Wheeler as “acting director of [the] Pasteur Institute.”
87. “Dr. Rambaud in Bad Shape,” NYTr, 5 August 1911, p. 7; “Dr. Rambaud May
Recover,” NYTr, 7 August 1911, p. 5.
88. “Friedmann Makes Test of His Serum,” NYT, 7 March 1913, p. 1 (for the
quotations); “Dr. Rambaud Joins Turtle Germ Group,” NYTr, 27 May 1913; “Health Board Bars
Use of Turtle Germ,” NYTr, 30 May 1913; “Dr. Rambaud Explains,” NYTr, 1 June 1913, p. 4;
“Friedmann Work Before the Censors,” NYT, 3 June 1913, p. 4.
89. “Woman Doctor for War,” NYTr, 14 October 1914, p. 7; “New War Relief Body
Organized….Dr. G. G. Rambaud Going to the Front,” NYTr, 5 November 1914, p. 3.
90. “Pasteur Institute Ends,” NYT, 21 September 1918, p. 7; Hansen, Picturing Medical
Progress, 294n26.