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statementVerified

Pasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites

In the months after July 1885 Louis Pasteur’s Academy communications and the press that followed them printed Joseph Meister’s name, age, Alsatian origin, and the count of bites as proof of the rabies method. In the causal graph this event weakens the driver Personal-Data Protection.

Read the full account

In the months after July 1885 Louis Pasteur’s Academy communications and the press that followed them printed Joseph Meister’s name, age, Alsatian origin, and the count of bites as proof of the rabies method. Nineteenth-century medicine often named patients. The welfare issue stored is the conversion of a child into a living advertisement without a later privacy regime. Meister later worked as a porter at the Institute; that later job is not this 1885 publication.

Context

Fame of the cure depended on a story with a face. Alsace made the face politically useful after 1871. A successful method could have been reported with initials. It was not. Journalists shared the broadcasting. Sharing does not erase Pasteur as the source of the clinical narrative.

Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, museums, and adaptations are not converted into extra lifetime acts.

Why it matters

Personal-data path of modest weight: a child’s identifiers used as scientific publicity. High confidence that the name was published; no later GDPR is back-dated as a fine.

Confidence is stated on the impact path, not hidden in adjectives. Naming the child is not the injection series and not the 1888 building. Mixed effects of Pasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites are separate paths.

Who was responsible

Contribution type and responsibility level for each recorded actor — not sole-author shorthand.

  • Louis Pasteur

    Person

    Direct responsibility

    responsibility level 0.24 · verified

    He supplied the identifying narrative the Academy and press repeated. Editors printed it; the child did not control the file.

What changed

Fact → Driver → Indicator. Relationship strength orders the paths; it is not the observed indicator movement.

    1. FactPasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites
    2. weakensDriverPersonal-Data Protection

    impact weight 0.25 · Effect from 2 November 1885 · verified

Evidence

The sources behind this fact and its verification state.

Verified2 sources on file
  1. 1.Institut Pasteur — origins of the rabies vaccine and the InstituteInstitut Pasteur · High credibility · verified
  2. 2.FEMS Microbiology Reviews — Louis Pasteur, a child of the JuraOxford University Press / FEMS · High credibility · verified
What the sources establish

Institut Pasteur at https://www.pasteur.fr/en/about-us/our-dna/history (opens in a new tab) still names Meister, age, and bite count as the origin story, showing how the identifiers became official memory. FEMS at https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/48/3/fuae010/7659358 (opens in a new tab) independently retells the named-child episode as the hinge of the Institute’s founding myth.

Established: Meister’s identifying details were published in 1885–86 scientific and press accounts originating in Pasteur’s reports. Not established: that the child legally objected at the time, or that a privacy statute existed to breach. Contribution is recorded as He supplied the identifying narrative the Academy and press repeated. Editors printed it; the child did not control the file. The dated heading stays Pasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites on 1885-11-02, not a later statue, UNESCO listing, or school film.

Shared responsibility is part of Pasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites. Naming Louis Pasteur does not delete co-authors, institutions, or later transmitters. The lag from 1885-11-02 to any measured indicator is not treated as zero. Alternative explanations — weather, other armies, later statutes, or independent cultural change — remain live where the sources do not close them.

The contribution type is direct. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself.

If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

Causal path

How this event connects to drivers and indicators in the graph.

  1. ActorLouis Pasteur
  2. contributed toFactPasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites
  3. weakensDriverPersonal-Data Protection

Cite this page

Factrail. (2026). Pasteur’s public communications print Joseph Meister’s name, age, origin, and bites. Factrail. https://factrail.ai/facts/pasteur-meister-named-1885

https://factrail.ai/facts/pasteur-meister-named-1885

Accessed 15 October 2026.

By the Factrail desk · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed

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