Why Can Modern Medicine STILL Not Cure These Horrifying Medieval Diseases?

Why Can Modern Medicine STILL Not Cure These Horrifying Medieval Diseases? Number ten: Rabies. On a September evening in eighteen eighty-five, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur's laboratory in Paris, his body torn by the bites of a rabid dog. The wounds covered his hands, his legs, and his thighs. The local physician who accompanied him told Pasteur plainly that the boy would die. Everyone in the room understood what that meant, because in eighteen eighty-five, as in every year before it stretching back through the entirety of recorded human history, a bite from a rabid animal followed by the appearance of symptoms meant one thing and one thing only. There was no recovery. There was no treatment. There was only the progression, the inevitable and grotesque progression, of a disease that had been consuming human lives since the ancient world first put words to the horror of a man who feared water and could not control his own body, and then died raving in the dark.