The Face of Evil

George Young, MD

Perhaps it was the howls

from the kennels, or the merciless insomnia

that grips men of thought, but that night Louis Pasteur had a frightful

dream that his little patient, Joseph Meister, was dying.

He knew the symptoms, having witnessed them himself as a boy in Arbois.

The snapping jaws, foam-flecked, the slobbering bite.

Then the clumsy attempt at treatment,

cauterization at the smithy with a red-hot iron, screams,

the smell of burning flesh.

And inevitably, later, the faint tingling in the cicatrix,

the suffocation at the very sight of water,

the paralysis, the coma and death, always the death.

He woke to the wind scratching at the window like a dog.

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