Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran was born on June 18, 1845, into a military family in Paris. He was the second child and only son of Louis-Theodore Laveran, a career military physician, and Marie-Louise Anselme Guénard de la Tour Laveran. Laveran received his secondary education at the College Sainte-Barbe and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1863, he entered the military medical school at Strasbourg, which his father had also attended; Laveran graduated in 1867. He joined the military medical service following graduation and saw active duty during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. In 1874, he won by competitive examination an appointment to a professorship earlier held by his father at the École du Val-de-Grace, a military medical school in Paris. This was a temporary appointment, and at its conclusion in 1878 he was sent to the military hospital at Bône (now Annaba) in Algeria.

It was while at B...