Pasteur's success with the rabies treatment was also the beginning of his relations with the United States. Just a few months after the very first rabies vaccination was given to an Alsacian boy named Joseph Meister in Paris, four American boys were bitten by a dog in Newark, New Jersey. In December 1885, after a public fundraising effort, they were sent to Paris for treatment. Pasteur and his American patients received massive press coverage for months making Pasteur a household name across the United States. In January 1886, when the boys returned to America in good health, they became national celebrities and a statue of Pasteur supervising a vaccination appeared in a New York City wax museum.

This story was so much on everyone's mind that, in February 1886, a weekly magazine of political satire called Judge featured Pasteur's famous vaccine at the center of this political cartoon. In "Judge's Wax Works," President Grover Cleveland is depicted as "Pasteur Cleveland" vaccinating government against corruption.

Just as a wax museum is filled with the day's most famous personalities and cultural references, the cartoon is filled with political caricatures of 1886. Along with "Pasteur Cleveland," this cartoon includes Joseph Pulitzer as Lady Liberty, the Tiger of Tammany Hall, Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, three little maids from the day's hit show, The Mikado, and many others.

When this artist used the image of Pasteur's rabies vaccinations to indicate his support for the President's promotion of civil service reform, he knew that this powerful image of the new life-saving remedy of immunization would speak loudly to the millions of Americans who were reading and talking about Pasteur's first American patients, the four little boys from Newark.

By Bert Hansen, Ph.D
History Department, Baruch College, CUNY