Scientific importance of Serbian Pasteur institutes

Abstract

Only 12 years after Paris, the first Pasteur Institute in Serbia and the Balkans was founded in Nis, in 1900. Its contribution to preventive medicine of Serbia was enormous, primarily in production of vaccine against variola and rabies. After the liberation in 1919, the Pasteur Institute was re-established and it continued its scientific work under the management of Gerasim Alivizatos, a Greek who had come to help Serbian people. He is the author of the so-called mixed method in rabies prophylaxis, in which he combined dilution of live vaccine with concentrated ether treated vaccine. He published his work on this method in the journal Deutschen Medicinische Wochenschrift in 1922. After 1928, the only active Pasteur Institute in the whole Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was the Pasteur Institute in Novi Sad, which has remained the central anti-rabies institution to the present day. Its first director, Dr. Adolf Hempt, born in Novi Sad in 1874, was the author of the world famous vaccine against rabies, which was named after him and was in use from 1925 to 1989. He was the first in the world to have made a completely inactive, i.e. dead vaccine, which was much safer for use, so many European countries such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary gradually accepted it under the name of Hempt, and from the Novi Sad Institute it was exported to some African countries as well. Dr Hempt published his first work on the new vaccine in the magazine Annales de l'Institut Pasteur in 1925 in French, and he also published a monograph in German by Bering Institute in 1938, nowadays ranked as a monograph of international importance.