Waldemar Haffkine Injected Himself With a Plague Vaccine on 10 January 1897, and His Bombay Laboratory Had Issued 2,380,288 Doses by 31 May 1901

On 8 October 1896 Waldemar Haffkine began work in one room and a corridor of the Petit Laboratory at Grant Medical College in Bombay, with a clerk and three messengers for staff. Just over three months later, on 10 January 1897, he injected himself with 10 cubic centimetres of heat-killed plague culture. By 31 May 1901 his laboratory had issued 2,380,288 doses of the vaccine, 1,939,437 of them to places in India, according to the report he sent to the Bombay government.

Major William Burney Bannerman’s description of the laboratory, quoted in a 2007 biography by the physiologist Barbara Hawgood in the Journal of Medical Biography, is the source for the one room and the staff of four. Today the laboratory is the Haffkine Institute at Parel. This article covers the vaccine, the evidence offered for it at the time, and the 1902 accident that nearly ended his career. It is history and gives no guidance on plague.

From cholera in Paris to plague in Bombay

Haffkine was born in Odessa in 1860 and worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he tried an anti-cholera vaccine on himself in July 1892, according to the Haffkine Institute’s own biography. He took it to India in 1893. Hawgood writes that by the end of July 1895 he had inoculated more than 42,000 people there, all of them volunteers. She cites a 1970 history of bacteriology by William Derek Foster, which names him as the person who made, in India in 1893, the first vaccinations against a bacterial disease whose usefulness seemed reasonably certain.

Alexandre Yersin identified the plague bacillus in Hong Kong in June 1894. Plague reached Bombay in late September 1896, and the Government of India, impressed by the cholera work, asked Haffkine to devise something similar. He entered the Indian Civil Service on 8 October and started that day. Bannerman wrote that the stalactite-like growth plague bacteria make in broth would remain tied to Haffkine’s name as an easy way to recognise the organism.

What went into the bottle

Haffkine described the method in the British Medical Journal on 12 June 1897. His cholera vaccine, he wrote, lowered the number of cases but not the death rate among those who still fell ill, so for plague he decided to combine large numbers of killed bacteria with the toxins the bacteria release into the liquid around them.

To grow them he floated drops of ghee, the clarified butter, on nutrient broth. Growth began as flakes under the drops, and about half a dozen crops a month could be collected. Heating the liquid to 70 degrees Celsius for an hour then killed the bacteria.

In December 1896, Hawgood reports, Haffkine protected rabbits from plague with a heat-killed culture. On 10 January 1897 he gave himself 10 cubic centimetres, a much larger dose than the 3 cubic centimetres planned for the public. She says the effects were pain at the injection site and fever and malaise for about two days.

The Byculla jail test of 30 January 1897

Plague broke out on 23 January 1897 in the House of Correction at Byculla, which held 345 inmates. Haffkine’s article records 9 cases and 5 deaths up to 29 January and 6 more cases, 3 of them fatal, on the morning of the 30th. That afternoon 154 prisoners from the same batches, living in the same conditions, volunteered for inoculation.

Three of the 154 died. One had a swollen gland when injected and two developed glands within hours, so Haffkine counted them as already infected. From the next day, by his count, there were 12 cases and 6 deaths among an average daily strength of 173 prisoners who were not inoculated, and 2 cases and no deaths among 148 who were.

He did not claim more than the numbers showed. Between 10 January and 6 May 1897, he wrote, 11,362 people from infected areas were inoculated outside the jail, with 12 deaths. Three of those were already unwell when injected and three fell ill within 12 hours. He added that figures for the general population were not available for an exact comparison, and gave only a rough estimate that the inoculated suffered about twenty times less than non-inoculated people living in the same conditions.

The Aga Khan’s bungalow and the move to Parel

Demand followed quickly. Production grew so fast, Hawgood says, that the laboratory had to move twice in 1897. In 1898 it went to Khushru Lodge, a bungalow owned by Sir Sultan Shah, the Aga Khan III and head of the Khoja community, who fitted it out at his own expense. About half the community, 10,000 to 12,000 Bombay Khojas by Hawgood’s figure, were inoculated under his auspices.

In 1898 the Baroda authorities invited Haffkine to run a trial at Undhera, a village of 1,031 people with plague in it. Each household was called out and about half its members were inoculated, with Haffkine treating one half of the village and Bannerman the other. Hawgood, drawing on Haffkine’s 1899 lecture, gives the result for the 28 affected families: 71 inoculated people had 8 attacks and 3 deaths, against 27 attacks and 26 deaths among 64 who were not. Bannerman’s 1901 pamphlet, summarised in the Indian Medical Gazette, also counts 3 deaths among the inoculated.

In June 1899 Haffkine lectured at the Royal Society in London. On 10 August 1899, the Haffkine Institute says, he entered the Old Government House at Parel as Director in Chief of the Plague Research Laboratory. The University of Edinburgh gave him its Cameron Prize in 1900, Hawgood writes, and in December 1901 he became Director-in-Chief of a staff of 53.

His own 1902 report adds 486,753 doses issued in the year to 31 May 1902, which brings the total to 2,867,041, with 2,383,162 for India and 483,879 for other countries. Within India, the Punjab took the largest share that year.

What the figures say, and what later reviewers add

Bannerman’s pamphlet, as the Indian Medical Gazette summarised it in May 1901, reported 1,628,696 doses issued up to the end of 1900 and, wherever records were reliable, a striking reduction in plague deaths among the inoculated. The Gazette lists his conclusions, among them that inoculation confers a high degree of immunity and so cuts the number of attacks sharply.

Later writers are more careful. Hawgood concludes that the vaccine was indisputably saving tens of thousands of lives but that its efficacy was probably lower than the Indian figures suggested, and she points to a 1903 review of cases that found plague had not always been proved. She cites a large matched trial in Java in 1921 and 1922, described in a 1953 book by L. F. Hirst, that showed a 50 percent reduction in plague deaths.

Stephen Smiley’s 2008 review in Expert Review of Vaccines notes that controlled trials were not performed, but that Haffkine’s vaccine likely gave people significant protection against bubonic plague. It adds that the recommended dose was meant to produce a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit in most recipients and that severe reactions limited acceptance. A 2024 review in npj Vaccines estimates 24 million doses between 1897 and 1935 and says the vaccine curtailed outbreaks in India. Hawgood gives nearly 26 million doses sent out by the end of 1925.

Mulkowal, October 1902

On 30 October 1902, 107 people were inoculated at Mulkowal in the Punjab. Hawgood writes that tetanus appeared in 19 of them six days later and all 19 died. They had all been injected from one bottle, labelled 53N and issued from the Bombay laboratory 26 days earlier. Another 88 people, given vaccine from other bottles, were unaffected.

A commission appointed by the Government of India reported on 16 April 1903 that the tetanus was in the bottle before it was opened at Mulkowal, and it blamed carelessness at the Bombay laboratory. It also objected that Haffkine had changed the production method the 1898 to 1899 commission had examined, dropping carbolic acid from the vaccine to save time. Haffkine was relieved of his post and argued that the contamination happened at the injection site.

A second review by the Lister Institute in London concluded in 1904 that the tetanus was in all probability in the bottle at inoculation but that its origin could not be determined. In May 1906 its governing body wrote that Haffkine had a right to the benefit of the doubt, and regretted describing its conclusion as the same as the commission’s. Papers from the inquiry, published on 1 December 1906, recorded that the assistant who opened the bottle dropped the forceps and rinsed them in carbolic lotion rather than flaming them, as the laboratory’s instructions required. Hawgood adds that he was following the Punjab Plague Manual of 1902, issued locally, which prescribed the rinse.

Opinion in 1907 was divided. A British Medical Journal editorial agreed with the commission, Hawgood says. Ronald Ross wrote in Nature on 21 March 1907 that the evidence gave no sign of when the tetanus bacillus entered the bottle, and ten bacteriologists signed a letter to The Times on 29 July asking the Government of India to clear Haffkine or order a new inquiry. Hawgood, who treats this as the exoneration, reports that on 29 November 1907 The Times printed an India Office letter to Haffkine recognising that an important body of scientific opinion favoured him and offering him work in India. He became Director-in-Chief of the Biological Laboratory in Calcutta in 1908, a research post without vaccine production.

From Plague Research Laboratory to Haffkine Institute

The Parel laboratory was renamed the Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory in 1905 or 1906, depending on the source, as its work widened to cholera and typhoid vaccines and diagnostic services. In 1925 its director, Lieutenant-Colonel F. P. Mackie of the Indian Medical Service, proposed calling it the Haffkine Institute, and the Bombay Government agreed. Institut Pasteur’s archives, the Haffkine Institute’s own biography and Hawgood all give 1925.

The Institute’s report for that year, quoted by Hawgood, called the new name a tardy but wholehearted recognition. Haffkine, by then living in France, replied that the work at Bombay had absorbed the best years of his life.

Under its director from 1932 to 1949, Lieutenant-Colonel Sahib Singh Sokhey, the Institute developed a biological assay of the vaccine’s protective power, which Hawgood says helped with variable quality. In 1975 the Maharashtra government split it into the Haffkine Biopharmaceutical Corporation and the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research and Testing. As of 2 November 2026 the Institute’s website says it was established in 1899, is among the oldest biomedical research institutes in the country and works on infectious diseases. For how Indian vaccine makers work today, see our account of how a batch is made and released and the piece on India’s pharmaceutical industry. The plague years also reached Pune, where Savitribai Phule died of the disease in March 1897.

On 15 April 2021, Scroll reported, the Department of Science and Technology allowed the Maharashtra-owned Haffkine Biopharma Corporation to produce Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin under a technology transfer, for a year.