In 1890, an Italian clinician found that sex workers with cancer of the uterine cervix went into remission when they were vaccinated against rabies. For several years afterward, the doctor traveled the Tuscan countryside injecting women with saliva from a dog with rabies. Results, however, were not recorded.
Years later, in 1904, an Italian woman went through two unpleasant experiences: She was bitten by a dog, presumable with rabies, and she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterine cervix. She was given the rabies vaccine for the dog bite and afterward her “enormously large” tumor disappeared—“il tumore non esisteva più.” The woman was able to live cancer-free until she died in 1912.
