World of Anatomy and Physiology on Charles Jules Henri Nicolle

Charles J. H. Nicolle, the recipient of the 1928 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, was recognized by the Swedish Academy for his research into the cause of typhus, a severe and widespread disease during the early twentieth century. Nicolle's discovery that typhus is transmitted by the human body louse--and therefore can be readily prevented--was of great benefit to both military and civilian medicine.

Born September 21, 1866, in Rouen, France, Charles Jules Henri Nicolle was the son of physician Eugène Nicolle. Charles's father was a medical doctor at the municipal hospital, as well as a professor of natural history at the École des Sciences et des Art. Encouraged by his brother, the noted bacteriologist Maurice Nicolle, Charles took a course in bacteriology at the Institute Pasteur in Paris, studying under the renowned bacteriologists, Émile Roux and Eacute;lie Metchnikoff. For his doctoral dissertation, Nicolle investigated the bacterium then called Ducrey's Bacillus (also known as Hemophilus ducreyi), the causative agent of soft chancre, a type of venereal disease.

Charles took his medical degree in 1893 in Paris, then returned to Rouen for a staff position in a hospital. Shortly thereafter, he married and the couple's two sons would eventually become physicians. Unable to develop a major biomedical research center in Rouen as he desired, Nicolle agreed in 1902 to assume the directorship of the Institute Pasteur in Tunis, Tunisia. For the remainder of his life, Nicolle lived and worked primarily in Tunis with occasional lecturing in Paris.

Affiliated with the original Institute Pasteur (which was founded in Paris in 1888), the institute in Tunis was basically an organization in name only. Over the years to come, however, Nicolle improved a run-down antirabies vaccination unit into a leading center for the study of North African and tropical diseases. It was in Tunis where Nicolle accomplished his groundbreaking work on typhus. He became intrigued by the observation that an outbreak of typhus did not seem to take hold in hospital wards as it did among the general populace of the city. Although the contagion infected workers who admitted patients into the hospital, it did not affect other patients or attendants in the actual wards. Those who collected or laundered the dirty clothes of newly admitted patients typically came down with the disease.

Realizing that the washing, shaving, and providing of clean clothes to the new patient was possibly the key to the pattern of infection, Nicolle initiated a series of experiments in 1909 to confirm his suspicion of the arthropod-borne nature of typhus. He theorized that lice, which attached themselves to the bodies and clothes of human beings, transmitted the disease, so he began his investigation by infusing a chimpanzee with human blood infected with typhus, then transferred the chimpanzee's blood to a healthy macaque monkey. When the fever and rash of typhus was seen on the monkey, Nicolle placed twenty-nine human body lice obtained from healthy humans on the skin of the macaque. These lice were later placed on the skin of a number of healthy monkeys, which all contracted the disease.

Once Nicolle isolated the relationship between typhus and the louse, preventative measures were established to counter unsanitary conditions. Nevertheless, the trenches of World War I remained major breeding places for the louse and typhus killed an enormous number of soldiers on all sides of the conflict. The development of the insecticide DDT by Paul Müller in 1939 was the most effective prophylactic against typhus, nearly eradicating the disease among soldiers during World War II.

Nicolle is also responsible for other important contributions to the science of bacteriology. Stemming from his research into typhus was his recognition of a phenomenon known as "inapparent infection," a state in which a carrier of a disease exhibits no symptoms. This theoretical discovery suggested how diseases survived from one epidemic to another.

Nicolle, along with a variety of other colleagues over time, also researched African infantile leishmaniasis, which affected humans, and a related disease in dogs. Another significant discovery concerned the role of flies in the transmission of the blinding disease trachoma. For these and other works, Nicolle received the French Commander of the Legion of Honor and was named to the French Academy of Medicine. In 1932 he became a professor in the College de France.

Besides his work in science, Nicolle was an accomplished literary figure, having published several novels. His scientific writings include five major books as well as numerous articles. Nicolle died on February 28, 1936 in Tunis.