a man who had directed on the rabies racket the penetrating light of scientific truth.

Dr. Webster’s Death Deplored
Research on Rabies Made Him a Benefactor of All Dogs and Their Owners.

We are quite certain that Dr. Leslie T. Webster never owned a show dog
and are inclined to think that he never had attended a dog show, yet
his sudden passing following a stroke this week robbed the purebred
and the mongrel alike of one of their greatest benefactors – a man who
had directed on the rabies racket the penetrating light of scientific
truth and who was finding his way through painstaking laboratory
research toward a really effective rabies vaccine.

There was a personal shock in the headline, “Dr. Leslie T. Webster
Dies:  Specialist in Rabies Field.”  We had been talking to his office
just before the holiday and learned that, recovered from an illness in
the spring, he expected to be back in his laboratory this month.  We
had planned to drop by to see whether work with ultra-violet radiation
to inactivate the rabies virus had reached the stage where a report on
it could be made public.  It was one of those calls which, through
pressure of other things, was put off until too late.

It was always a pleasure to see Dr. Webster.  There was always a
twinkle in his eye and a remarkable patience as he explained some of
the intricacies of his work to the untutored layman.  He spoke with a
bit of hesitation, seemingly a tiny impediment in speech, but he was
so thoroughly a master of his subject that he held his audience,
whether it was the lone layman or a gathering of fellow scientists or
groups of medical or veterinary men.

Our first contact with him came about five years ago.  We had plunged
into controversy growing out of the wide agitation for compulsory
vaccination to combat rabies, attributing much of the agitation to the
makers of the vaccines, and we had them buzzing around our ears like
angry hornets.  There was comparatively little scientific literature
dealing with the subject from disinterested sources and in that little
the name of Dr. Leslie T. Webster of the Institute for Medical
Research stood out.  He had read a paper before a Massachusetts
Medical Group in which he questioned many popular theories about
rabies.  We sought and obtained a chance to visit him at the
institute.

Members of the Institute, we learned, do not give interviews.  When
they have reached conclusions which they feel are important,
announcement is made of them through the Institute’s organ, The
Journal of Experimental Medicine.  Dr. Webster, however, was willing
to and did spend hours straightening out a man who was not after a
story but who wanted to know for his own guidance in future writing,
what was known about rabies and the most effective means of combating
it.  It took hours because Dr. Webster did not content himself with
going into the published material but in reviewing the tremendous
research he had undertaken, the checking of all experiments in medical
history, in which at least five animals had been used.  It showed how
inadequate most of these had been and how strangely rabies had been
neglected.

At that time Dr. Webster had completed exhaustive tests with
commercial vaccines which proved that those inactivated with phenol
failed to give immunity and those inactivated with chloroform provided
that immunity only if the injection was from two to five times that
prescribed for dogs per gram of body weight.  The tests were made on
mice but held true for dogs, as Dr. Webster pointed out, because
rabies is on of the diseases with the same reaction on all animals,
horses, cows, dogs, foxes, rodents, and men.  The fact that he had
proved conclusively that the vaccines which thousands of pet owners
were being forced by law in some States, a number of cities and many
localities to use on their pets was ineffective disturbed him but he
was unwilling to have it magnified.  As he properly pointed out, “Some
day the effective vaccine will be found and we don’t want to have to
overcome a prejudice that all vaccines are worthless.”

When the report with its indictment of the vaccines appeared, Dr.
Webster was much amused by the journalistic treatment.  The report, in
true scientific fashion, started with the recitation of the problem, a
description of the laboratory tests and arrived at the carefully
phrased conclusions – all completely irrefutable from a scientific
point of view.  Naturally to the newspaper man and his public, it was
the conclusion that carried the news.  Dr. Webster chuckled at what he
considered putting the cart before the horse and at his own lesson in
journalism – the telling of the what, when, where and why at the start
of the story.  To a degree he used the journalistic technique in his
own book, “Rabies,” the first comprehensive textbook on the disease,
but he never strayed far from the scientific form – all of its
conclusions were most carefully supported by exhibits and references.

It was following the publication of his book that Dr. Webster was
given the annual award of the Dog Writer’s Association for the “person
who, over a long period of time, has performed a meritorious work in
the field of dogs.”  He told us privately that few things had come to
him which gave him greater pleasure and the members of the association
were agreed that never had they made a happier choice of the recipient
of their medal.

One of the tragic aspects of Dr. Webster’s death is that he had been
working with promising results on a virus inactivated by ultra-violet
rays.  That work, incidentally, had an important bearing on results
accomplished by other Rockefeller Institute scientists with influenza
virus.  In this, however, as in his other researches, he had able
assistants who had worked with him and who can be expected to carry
on.  To them his methods, his personality and his hopes will
undoubtedly give special inspiration.


By Arthur Roland
New York Sun
July 16, 1943