Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle

Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle (born Sept. 21, 1866, Rouen, France—died Feb. 28, 1936, Tunis, Tunisia) was a French bacteriologist who received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery (1909) that typhus is transmitted by the body louse.

After obtaining his medical degree in Paris in 1893, Nicolle returned to Rouen, where he became a member of the medical faculty and engaged in bacteriological research. In 1902 he was appointed director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, and during his 31 years’ tenure in that post, the institute became a distinguished centre for bacteriological research and for the production of serums and vaccines to combat infectious diseases.

In Tunis Nicolle noticed that typhus was very contagious outside the hospital, with sufferers of the disease transmitting it to many people who came into contact with them. Once inside the hospital, however, these same patients ceased to be contagious. Nicolle suspected that the key point in this reversal was that of admission to the hospital, when patients were bathed and their clothes were confiscated. The carrier of typhus must be in the patients’ clothes or on their skin and could be removed from the body by washing. The obvious candidate for the carrier was the body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus), which Nicolle proved to be the culprit in 1909 in a series of experiments involving monkeys.

Nicolle extended his work on typhus to distinguish between the classical louse-borne form of the disease and murine typhus, which is conveyed to humans by the rat flea. He also made valuable contributions to the knowledge of rinderpest, brucellosis, measles, diphtheria, and tuberculosis.