Nobel Laureate Charles Nicolle

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1928

"for his work on typhus"

Charles Jules Henri Nicolle (1886 - 1936) was a French scientist who studied typhus while he was Director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis. He realized that patients suffering from typhus were usually contageous but when they entered the hospital they were no longer contageous after a bath and a change of clothes. This led him to conclude that the disease was being spread by something in the clothing and lice were a prime suspect.

He soon confirmed his hypothesis by infecting chimpanzees and showing that the disease could be transferred by lice from one infected chimp to another uninfected animal. Further research showed that the disease was actually being transferred by microbes in lice excrement and through insect bites. In addition to lice, mites and fleas can also transmit various forms of typhus.

Nicolle was not able to develop a vaccine against typhus. Even today there is no effective vaccine available but the disease can be treated by antibiotics, especially doxycycline. [See Monday's Molecule #246]

It's pretty amazing to think that the cause of such a horrible disease was only discovered in the lifetime of our parents or grandparents (or great-grandparents).

Here's part of the Award Ceremony Speech.

THEME:
Nobel Laureates

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

In awarding the 1928 Nobel Prize for Medicine to Dr. Charles Nicolle, Director of the Pasteur Institute at Tunis, the Caroline Institute wished to pay tribute to a man who has realized one of the greatest conquests in the field of prophylactic medicine, i.e. the vanquishing of typhus.

... The disease has been known since the beginning of all time. The plague which devastated Attica, especially Athens in the year 430 B.C., and which Thucydides describes in his work on the Peloponnesian War, was most likely an epidemic of typhus. The picture that the great historian draws of the disease agrees in certain respects, down to the smallest details, with the clinical picture we were able to observe during the Great War. Epidemics followed one another without respite during the great wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, typhus raged over the whole of Central Europe. The Napoleonic Wars caused the disease to flare up again. In the general disorganization which followed the Grand Army’s retreat from Russia, typhus claimed innumerable victims amongst the troops and amongst the civilian population. Further epidemics broke out during the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War, affecting both sides.

With the progress of civilization and during the period of peace and prosperity which, in all, lasted from the end of the nineteenth century until 1914, typhus seemed of its own accord to have become restricted to certain remote regions of Europe and to certain extra-European countries where, from time immemorial, the disease had existed endemically.

At the beginning of this North Africa was among these non-European countries where the disease had been a veritable national scourge for several centuries. As soon as he took up his appointment as Director of the Pasteur Institute at Tunis, young Dr. Charles Nicolle was immediately brought into contact with the scientific and practical problems that typhus had created in this country.

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Photo Credit: The figure is from Wikipedia.

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