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. The results, however, were not recorded.
Years later, in 1904, an Italian woman went through two unpleasant experiences: she was bitten by a dog, presumably 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. The woman was able to live cancer-free until she died in 1912.
Based on these experiences, Nicola De Pace reported in 1910 that several other patients with uterine cervical cancer received the rabies vaccine with a weakened rabies virus, unable to produce the disease. De Pace stated that tumors in some patients shrank in size, although all of them had a relapse from their cancer and died as a result of it.