The Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine

On a Sunday morning early in 1889, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir James Whitehead, visited Pasteur in his institute in Paris. He went, as he says, as a business man to consult the records of the treatment for rabies that Pasteur had recently developed. He went, I believe, at the suggestion of his friend Ray Lankester who was much concerned at the increase of rabies in this country. He returned determined that some public recognition should be made in Great Britain of Pasteur’s work for humanity and his generosity in treating, free of cost, persons who were bitten by rabid dogs in this country, and that the establishment of a treatment centre for rabies in London should be seriously entertained. He decided to call a meeting at the Mansion House, and a considerable correspondence passed between him and Ray Lankester as to the business which should be transacted. From the very outset Ray Lankester, supported by Sir Henry Roscoe, James Paget and others, was against the establishment in London of a treatment centre for rabies. They and many others had always argued that this disease could be stamped out from these islands by the muzzling of dogs and a proper quarantine for newly imported animals. Pasteur himself had recommended this line of action in the public press. Ray Lankester argued with the Lord Mayor that if a treatment centre was established in London it would only facilitate the evasion of the public duty to stamp out rabies. The possible establishment of a new institute had, however, got abroad and a vigorous press campaign was started, at the instigation of anti-vivisectionists, against this development, on the grounds that it would perpetuate in this country all the cruelty and pain which Pasteur had been accused of inflicting upon animals in Paris for many years past. The opposition was a very real one, for Ray Lankester wrote to the Lord Mayor just before the meeting: ‘It will be necessary to have a good posse of police to guard the entrance, and the stewards must prevent anyone from obtaining admission who has not received an invitation.’ The meeting passed off without incident. The business of the meeting concerned the public expression of thanks to Pasteur, the setting up of a committee to collect funds in order to make a presentation to his institute, and inviting the Government to stamp out rabies by the simultaneous muzzling of all dogs throughout the British Isles and by effective quarantine. Some of the speakers referred, however, to the idea of establishing a new institute. Michael Foster drew the attention of the meeting to the fact that those who pursued a certain branch of science ‘are put upon a criminal footing and are only allowed to pursue their investigations upon ticket of leave’, that ‘it would not do simply to establish in this country a merely mechanical shop, so to speak, for the mere repetition of inoculation. We are only beginning this great subject of inoculation; inquiry must go on, and unless an institute is kept sweet by the salt of investigation, it will become a hindrance.’ He went on: ‘I think that, with our present regulations, the necessary inquiries which belong to this work are better carried out in Paris than in London, and you would do well to give your money to Paris and not keep it for London.’ Ray Lankester thought it was absurd to attempt to start an institute in London by means of private subscriptions. He said: ‘It cannot be done, it is simply out of the question; it has been tried. But I may say I look forward to the time when an institute will be established in London in the only way in which it can be established, that is, under the auspices of the Government.’ In the autumn of 1889 the Mansion House Committee, under the chairmanship of the Lord Mayor, presented £2000 to the Pasteur Institute.