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Pasteur Institutes USA A Turn-of-the-Century PhenomenonEditor’s Note: This page is adapted from a past newsletter article by Bert Hansen, Ph.D., a professor of history at Baruch College and the author of “Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America” published by Rutgers University Press, 2009. The Pasteur Foundation thanks Dr. Hansen for sharing some of his research on this topic with us.
Circling the globe, the Pasteur Institutes, established as satellites of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, are justifiably world famous. Colleagues and students of Louis Pasteur created many important centers abroad as extensions of the central organization in Paris. The first was opened in Saigon by Albert Calmette in 1891. Today, approximately thirty institutes in the global network of the Institut Pasteur exist in cities such as Athens, Bangui, Phnom Penh, Shanghai and St. Petersburg. While the United States has never hosted such official daughter institutes, Americans did establish a number of organizations at the turn of the century that imitated the great center in Paris. In late 1885, after Louis Pasteur first publicly announced his inoculation to prevent rabies infections, the American medical community began to devise ways to provide this remedy on this side of the Atlantic. Enthusiasm was further fueled by December's torrent of newspaper articles about four boys from Newark, New Jersey, who traveled to Paris for Pasteur’s cure.
Rabies treatment efforts were organized under the name “Pasteur Institute” in a surprisingly large number of U.S. cities. Some carried out research, as well as the clinical treatment of rabies. Some were agencies of state health departments, using “Pasteur Institute” or “Division” or “Department” to focus on rabies treatment, the advance most closely associated in America with Pasteur's name prior to the popularity of milk pasteurization after about 1920. Long ignored by historians, the uneven fortunes of America's Pasteur Institutes, none of which survive in name today, are only now becoming known. In the interest of advancing this knowledge, and in the hope of uncovering further documentation of their unique histories, a chronological list of some of the historic American institutes bearing the Pasteur name and a few images follow.
Historic American Pasteur Institutes (plans for this facility were abandoned) 1886 - New York (plans for this institute were abandoned) 1890 - New York 1890 - Chicago 1897 - Baltimore 1900 - Pittsburgh 1900 - St. Louis 1903 - Ann Arbor 1903 - Austin 1904 - Philadelphia 1908 - Atlanta 1908 - Washington, DC 1908 - Berkeley
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