“Your Majesty is kind enough to mention my studies on hydrophobia; they are making good and uninterrupted progress. I consider, however, that it will take me nearly two years more to bring them to a happy issue....
“What I want to do is to obtain prophylaxis of rabies after bites.
“Until now I have not dared to attempt anything on men, in spite of my own confidence in the result and the numerous opportunities afforded to me since my last reading at the Academy of Sciences. I fear too much that a failure might compromise the future, and I want first to accumulate successful cases on animals. Things in that direction are going very well indeed; I already have several examples of dogs made refractory after a rabietic bite. I take two dogs, cause them both to be bitten by a mad dog; I vaccinate the one and leave the other without any treatment: the latter dies and the first remains perfectly well.
“But even when I shall have multiplied examples of the prophylaxis of rabies in dogs, I think my hand will tremble when I go on to Mankind. It is here that the high and powerful initiative of the head of a State might intervene for the good of humanity. If I were a King, an Emperor, or even the President of a Republic, this is how I should exercise my right of pardoning criminals condemned to death. I should invite the counsel of a condemned man, on the eve of the day fixed for his execution, to choose between certain death and an experiment which would consist in several preventive inoculations of rabic virus, in order to make the subject’s constitution refractory to rabies. If he survived this experiment—and I am convinced that he would—his life would be saved and his punishment commuted to a lifelong surveillance, as a guarantee towards that society which had condemned him.
“All condemned men would accept these conditions, death being their only terror.
“This brings me to the question of cholera, of which Your Majesty also has the kindness to speak to me. Neither Dr. Koch nor Drs. Straus and Roux have succeeded in giving cholera to animals, and therefore great uncertainty prevails regarding the bacillus to which Dr. Koch attributes the causation of cholera. It ought to be possible to try and communicate cholera to criminals condemned to death, by the injection of cultures of that bacillus. When the disease declared itself, a test could be made of the remedies which are counselled as apparently most efficacious.
“I attach so much importance to these measures, that, if Your Majesty shared my views, I should willingly come to Rio Janeiro, notwithstanding my age and the state of my health, in order to undertake such studies on the prophylaxis of hydrophobia and the contagion of cholera and its remedies.
“I am, with profound respect, Your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant.”
In other times, the right of pardon could be exercised in the form of a chance of life offered to a criminal lending himself to an experiment. Louis XVI, having admired a fire balloon rising above Versailles, thought of proposing to two condemned men that they should attempt to go up in one. But Pilâtre des Roziers, whose ambition it was to be the first aëronaut, was indignant at the thought that “vile criminals should be the first to rise up in the air.” He won his cause, and in November, 1783, he organized an ascent at the Muette which lasted twenty minutes.
In England, in the eighteenth century, before Jenner’s discovery, successful attempts had been made at the direct inoculation of small-pox. In some historical and medical Researches on Vaccine, published in 1803, Husson relates that the King of England, wishing to have the members of his family inoculated, began by having the method tried on six criminals condemned to death; they were all saved, and the Royal Family submitted to inoculation.