person
Louis Pasteur
Pasteur
also: Пастер
French chemist and microbiologist (1822-1895) who developed the first successful rabies vaccine in 1885; his newly opened Paris institute became, within months, the byword destination for anyone bitten by a possibly rabid animal anywhere in Europe, including provincial Russia -- the entire premise of the story's title journey.
Reading notes
- To F. O. Shekhtel, 10 February 1888. Moscow. §5 like Pasteur's rabbit
A joking self-comparison: Louis Pasteur's rabies research involved inoculating and testing on laboratory rabbits, whose irritability under repeated treatment had become a stock comic image. Chekhov casts his own mild crossness at being neglected by Schechtel as similarly reflexive and harmless.
- To Paris! §21 В Париж бы ехали
By the mid-1880s, Louis Pasteur's Paris laboratory (formalized as the Institut Pasteur in 1888) was the only place offering his newly developed rabies vaccine, and reports of its success made a journey to Pasteur the obligatory, headline-making response to any rabid-animal bite across Europe -- including, absurdly, for a village official nipped on the finger by a stray dog whose madness was never actually confirmed.