In his best-selling Microbe Hunters,, (Harcourt, Brace, 1926/1953) Paul de Kruif gave a highly fanciful account of 19 Russian peasants who, bitten by an allegedly rabid wolf, traveled to Paris in order to receive the newly announced Pasteur treatment from the old master himself. According to de Kruif, 16 of these Russian patients were "saved" by Pasteur’s shots and "only three" died. Pasteur became an international hero after that exploit and contributed substantially to the glamorization of "modern" laboratory Science. Three deaths out of 19 makes over 15 percent casualties. "But knowing, as we know today, that not one in a hundred people bitten by a rabid dog is likely to catch the infection, we must infer that at least some and probably all three of those Russian peasants died because of Pasteur’s vaccine, as did uncounted people later on. Besides, at the time there were no facilities in Russia to find out whether a wolf had rabies. Hungry wolves attacking villagers in winter were a common occurrence; and even today many people, in Italy for instance, believe that any dog that bites them must be affected with rabies, otherwise it wouldn’t have bitten them."