Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

‘Birth, life, and death of infectious diseases’: Charles Nicolle (1866–1936) and the invention of medical ecology in France

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In teasing out the diverse origins of our “modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease” (Mendelsohn, in: Lawrence and Weisz (eds) Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), historians have downplayed the importance of parasitology in the development of a natural history perspective on disease. The present article reassesses the significance of parasitology for the “invention” of medical ecology in post-war France. Focussing on the works of microbiologist Charles Nicolle (1866–1936) and on that of physician and zoologist Hervé Harant (1901–1986), I argue that French “medical ecology” was not professionally (or cognitively) insulated from some major trends in parasitology, especially in Tunis where disciplinary borders in the medical sciences collapsed. This argument supports the claim that ecological perspectives of disease developed in colonial context (Anderson in Osiris 19: 39–61, 2004) but I show that parasitologists such as Harant built on the works of medical geographers who had called attention to the dynamic and complex biological relations between health and environment in fashioning the field of medical ecology in the mid-1950s. As the network of scientists who contributed to the global emergence of “disease ecology” is widening, both medical geography and parasitology stand out as relevant sites of inquiries for a broader historical understanding of the multiple “ecological visions” in twentieth-century biomedical sciences.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Institut Pasteur/Musée Pasteur

Fig. 2

Institut Pasteur/Musée Pasteur

Fig. 3

Institut Pasteur/Musée Pasteur

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. On the development of virology, the identification of new disease agents, and the development of new detecting methods, see Méthot (2016a).

  2. Tilley (2011) focuses especially on tropical medicine and its connection with the rise of ecological thinking in medical sciences. See also Worboys (1988).

  3. In a recent article, Anderson commented further that “the study of parasites often did not appeal to those committed to identifying and tracking bacteria” (2016, p. 245).

  4. For works in English on the history of medical geography, see Barrett (2000), Boloton Valençius (2000). On the relation between medical geography and disease ecology, see Arrizabalaga (2018), this issue.

  5. For example, Anderson writes that contrary to older medical geography, disease ecology is not “determinist” and postulates an “evolutionary time scale” and “integrative models” (2004, p. 42).

  6. On Smith, see Méthot (2012), on Burnet, see Anderson (2016), on Meyer and Dubos, see Honigsbaum (2016, 2017), and on Fenner see Anderson (2017).

  7. Most books on Nicolle are written in a hagiographic perspective (e.g., Lot 1953). But see also Huet (1995). Even recent contributions depict him as the “conqueror of typhus” (Dworkin and Tan 2012).

  8. “We had never envisaged […] the dynamical evolution of infectious diseases in the course of history. One day, he [Nicolle] projected the extraordinary film of their development in time and space… He had the singular gift of deciphering […] the secret relations between the things he was interested in… […] It is the privilege of the genius” (Leriche, cited in Lot 1953, p. 65). According to Henri Mollaret, no other book was “more prophetic” than Destin des maladies infectieuses. “Each year, since the half century that went by has confirmed the correctness of his [Nicolle’s] grand vision of infectious diseases” (1986, p. 191).

  9. On May, see Brown and Moon (2004), and Arrizabalaga (2018). On Sorre, see Simon (2016).

  10. This book is an augmented version of an earlier essay titled Naissance, vie et mort des maladies infectieuses [Birth, Life, and Death of Infectious Diseases] (1930).

  11. Maurice’s career started when at the request of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918), Roux sent him to Constantinople directing the Imperial Institute of Bacteriology from 1893 to 1901. On the Imperial Bacteriological Institute of Constantinople and Maurice Nicolle, see Dedet (2000, pp. 151–154).

  12. This career choice was not dictated by an actual interest in medical science but was foremost the result of his father’s wish. Nicolle was more inclined toward literature, philosophy, and history than natural sciences.

  13. In 1895, Nicolle married Alice Avice and had two children, Marcelle (1896–1985) and Pierre (1898–1984), who went on to have a career in medicine and medical microbiology respectively.

  14. On the conflict between clinicians and bacteriologist, see Maulitz (1979), and on the dispute that opposed Nicolle to his physician colleagues in Rouen, see Pelis (2006, pp. 25–28).

  15. The post was first offered to Maurice who had returned to Paris in 1901. Owing perhaps to his generally disappointing experience at the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory in Turkey, he declined it and Roux convinced his younger brother to accept the post of director.

  16. When typhus broke out in South America and Eastern Europe in the early 1930s, Nicolle’s research group was part of the international team composed of researchers from the United States, Mexico, and Poland. His view was that two forms of typhus existed and sometimes cohabited, namely: “new world” typhus (murine typhus) and “old world” (or historical) typhus (exanthematic typhus).

  17. “Mon cher Collègue, je prends des dispositions pour que vous trouviez à votre arrivée à Tunis, fin juillet, un lot important de scorpions des espèces que vous désirez.” Letter (087804162600060) from Nicolle to Pavlovsky, June 7th (No year but certainly in 1914).

  18. Nicolle and Duhamel exchanged over 450 letters, many of which have now been edited and published by Hueber (1996).

  19. “The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that such a discovery [inapparent infection] has the capacity to overturn not only pathology, but also, and I would say principally, psychology.” Letter from Duhamel to Nicolle, October 25th 1924 (in Pelis 2006, p. 136).

  20. On the history of the concept of “healthy carrier,” see Mendelsohn (2001) and Gradmann (2010). For a discussion of Nicolle’s concept of inapparent infection in relation to terms such as “latent infections,” “symptomless infections,” and “sub-pathological infections,” see Meyer (1936).

  21. Whereas Naissance, vie et mort des maladies infectieuses attempts to conceptualize infectious diseases as “biological phenomena,” which, Nicolle argued, must be studied with a “biological mind” (Nicolle 1930, pp. 28, 30), Smith tried to make students “think biologically” about disease (Smith 1931, p. 6).

  22. Testing the hypothesis that lice on patients’ clothes were the vectors of the disease, Nicolle first inoculated a chimpanzee with blood from a patient suffering from typhus. Twenty-four hours later, the animal presented the typical signs and symptoms of typhus: it was febrile, had skin eruptions, and remained in a prostrate position. Drawing blood from the chimp, he injected a toque macaque that became ill 13 days later. Dropping lice on the ill-macaque, he transferred those a few days later to another group of macaques and recorded that these individuals also contracted the disease. On these experiments, see Schultz and Morens (2008).

  23. Nicolle first arrived at the concept of inapparent infection during his attempts at controlling typhus with convalescent serum. With Lebailly, he noted that certain guinea-pigs infected with typhus blood do not hitherto become resistant to the pathogen but were “inapparently” infected. 16 days after infection, blood taken from these animals was used to inoculate a monkey (Maccacus sinicus) that, 7 days of incubation later, showed a temperature curve typical of a typhus infection (Nicolle and Lebailly 1919–1920). Based on this concept, Nicolle mounted a critique of Koch’s postulates as he disparaged the claim that “the introduction of a pure culture of a microbe will reproduce, in susceptible species, a typical infection” (Nicolle 1925, p. 150).

  24. For example, a priority dispute—which was later resolved—concerning the role of lice in transmitting typhus flared between him and the bacteriologists brothers Edmond (1876–1969) and Étienne Sergent (1878–1948) in Alger (Dedet 2013); he resented microbiologist Etienne Burnet (1873–1960), his préparateur, whose novels were more acclaimed than his own (Pelis 2006); his profit-oriented strategy in vaccine production clashed with Roux’s policy (Pelis 1997); Nicolle’s professional relations with Émile Brumpt in Paris were particularly difficult (Théodoridès 1977); and, finally, his personal relation with his brother Maurice fell apart in the 1920s, though Charles would be inspired by his brother’s work in immunology—even borrowing his evocative notion of “mosaic”.

  25. For Koch, too, parasitology was a natural extension of bacteriology, although he never became much of an ecologist. See Gradmann (2010).

  26. On Blanchard and the history of French parasitology, see Osborne (2008), Harant (1968).

  27. Anthropologist Arthur Bordier (1841–1910), for instance, claimed that colonization could “only be accomplished through science” (Bordier 1884, p. xiii, cited in Osborne 2000, p. 47; emphasis in original). Pointing to the benefits in terms of health garnered for colonized populations provided a rationale for political actions. On the support of colonialism by medicine, see Pelis (2006) and Anderson (2006). For an overview of French science in colonial context, see Osborne (2005).

  28. Nicolle’s long-term assistant in Tunis, Habib ben Abdesselem, was bitten 6515 times by the lice without developing relapsing fever. Such “extreme experimentation,” as Pelis calls it, led Nicolle to “prove” a negative claim, namely: that louse bites do not transmit disease per se (Pelis 2006, p. 82).

  29. Relapsing fever is now known to be caused by various spirochete species of the Borrelia genus. The epidemic form of the disease is transmitted by lice while the endemic form is transmitted by ticks (Meri et al. 2006).

  30. “Les microbes qui causent la fièvre récurrente mondiale, les spirochètes, absorbés avec le sang du malade par le pou, seul agent de transmission de l’infection, subissent, dans l’organisme de l’insecte, un cycle de transformations. Ce cycle consiste dans la division des spirochètes en granules. Il aboutit à la production, à partir de ces granules, de nouveaux spirochètes très virulents. Leur siège exclusif est le sang du pou. Les spirochètes se trouvent donc embouteillés chez l’insecte. Normalement, ils n’en sortiront pas; logiquement, la raison les condamne à n’en pas sortir. L’évolution naturelle aurait donc pour conséquence la disparition du spirochète, égaré dans la circulation du pou comme dans un cul-de-sac; et, le retour à l’homme ne pouvant se faire que par l’intermédiaire du pou, non seulement l’existence de la lignée serait compromise, mais celle de l’espèce se trouverait condamnée. […] La succession des faits qui assurent la conservation de ces spirochètes dans la nature est une chaine d’accidents qui peuvent évidemment ne pas se produire, mais qui se produisent fatalement sur quelques poux, tout au moins. Il n’en faut pas davantage pour qu’une espèce microbienne et la maladie grave qu’elle détermine se conservent. De tels faits paraissent absurdes à notre logique. C’est notre logique qui est absurde, puisqu’ils sont” (Nicolle 1934, pp. 18–20.

  31. On Pasteur’s concept of variable virulence, see Moulin (1992), Geison (1995), Gayon (1995), Pelis (2006).

  32. Smith had claimed that “nature is continuously experimenting” and that “[e]xperiments are imitations of Nature with the unknown factors controlled or eliminated” (Smith 1921, pp. 1–2).

  33. Exactly like Pasteur, Nicolle considered “history” and “laboratory” as main sources of knowledge about past diseases: “We have at our disposal two methods,” he writes, “the first […] is the historical methods” and “the second is offered by the experimentation, and allows us to come to see, if not new diseases, at least new modalities of disease, giving us some justification to suppose that events took place at some earlier time in nature in the same they take place today” (Nicolle 1930, cited in Pelis 2006, p. 186).

  34. Nicolle’s book on the birth, life, and death of infectious pathologies makes no reference to Pasteur’s speculation about the origins of infectious diseases in history.

  35. Elsewhere, Nicolle argued that “in the creation of new diseases, in the adaptation of a virus to a living being which was until then refractory, nature uses a slow and repeated effort, whose mechanism is close to the transformations of living forms, even if it does not identify with it; sometimes, however, all of a sudden, and with no apparent preparation, nature does so by a phenomenon analogous to the mutation” (Nicolle 1934, p. 131). For him, the adaptation of microorganisms to their hosts could either be “progressive” of the result of “sudden mutations,” and he saw those biological processes as analogous to the operations of the human mind in solving practical problems, namely: the slow progress of intelligence and the sudden intuition typical of scientific discovery (1934, 10).

  36. “Je m’empresse de répondre à votre lettre du 23 février en vous disant toute ma joie de voir enfin la chaire d’Histoire naturelle de Montpellier sur le point d’être recréée […] En attendant le grand plaisir de savoir comment il me sera possible de vous aider, je vous adresse, mon cher Collègue, l’assurance de mes sentiments sympathiques et dévoués.” Letter from Brumpt to Harant, February 26th 1945. Source: Hervé Harant Papers, BPT.B4.

  37. Trained under Brumpt in 1947, and educated in biology at Harvard (1948) and Paris (1953), Théodoridès held doctoral degrees in parasitology and humanities. He was recruited at the CNRS in 1949 and joined Grassé’s laboratory in 1955. In the 1950s and 1960s Théodoridès stood at the centre of a growing, international network of medical ecology that bridge the East and the West. In addition to knowing Brumpt, Harant, and Grassé personally, he had even met Pavlovsky during one of his trips and delivered a letter on his behalf to Marcel Baltazard in Teheran in 1959, in an attempt to facilitate communication between Pastorian and Russian biomedical scientists. “M. Théodoridès vient d’arriver de Paris à Téhéran et m’a remis la carte que vous avez bien voulu lui donner pour moi.” Lettre from Baltazard to Pavlovsky, Octobre 29th 1959. Source: Archives of the Pasteur Institute, Paris.

  38. Letter from Chadli to Harant, January 26, 1966; Letter from Chadli to Harant, June 30 1966. Source: Hervé Harant Papers, Institut Pasteur, Paris. Box ARC 22.

  39. “Je vous félicite d’organiser le centenaire de NICOLLE. Je pense pouvoir vous envoyer 5 ou 6 pages intitulées: ‘Nicolle, fondateur de l’Écologie Médicale’”. Letter from Harant to Chadli, February 7, 1966. Source: Hervé Harant Papers, Institut Pasteur, Paris, Box ARC 22.

  40. Harant, “Unpublished manuscript.” Source: H. Harant Papers, Université de Montpellier.

  41. Historians have long wondered whether the writings of Sorre had influenced Jacques May’s work on medical geography, and in particular whether the former “borrowed” the concept of “parasitic complexes” from the latter (Akhtar 2003). A recent article has shown that it was May who borrowed the concept from Sorre: “J’avais depuis longtemps le désir de prendre contact avec vous. J’ai lu, non seulement vos livres récents sur les Fondements de la géographie humaine, mais votre article original (je n’en connais point qui lui soit antérieur) paru dans les Annales de Géographie le 15 janvier 1933. […] C’est à vous, Monsieur, que l’on doit l’idée féconde de considérer la maladie comme un complexe pathogène.” Letter from May to Sorre, May 23rd, 1949, New York. Source: Simon (2016).

  42. The glossary of Pavlovsky’s book on the “nidality” of disease lists a number of cognate terms such as “biopathocenose,” “parasitocenose,” “biogeocenose,” and “biocenology” (Pavlovsky 1966, pp. 246–250).

  43. I thank Staffan Müller-Wille for insisting that I clarify this point.

References

  • Akhtar, R. (2003). Medical geography: Has J.M. May borrowed M. Sorre’s 1933 concept of pathogenic complexes? Cybergo: European Journal of Geography. Épistémologie, Histoire de la géographie, Didactique. https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.3976.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amsterdamska, O. (2004). Achieving disbelief: Thought styles, microbial variation, and American and British epidemiology, 1900–1940. Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35, 483–507.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, W. (2004). Natural histories of infectious disease: ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science. Osiris, 19, 39–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, W. (2006). Colonial pathologies: American tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the Philippines. Duke: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, W. (2016). Post-colonial ecologies of parasite and host: making parasitism cosmopolitan. Journal of the History of Biology, 49, 241–259.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, W. (2017). Nowhere to run, rabbit: The cold-war calculus of disease ecology. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 39, 13.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anglada, C. (1869). Étude sur les maladies nouvelles et les maladies éteintes. Paris: J.P. Baillière.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arrizabalaga, J. (2018). At the intersection of medical geography and disease ecology: Mirko Grmek, Jacques May and the concept of pathocenosis. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 40, 71.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baltazard, M. (1966). Héritage de Charles Nicolle. La presse médicale, 74, 2177–2180.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barrett, F. A. (2000). Disease and geography: The history of an idea. Toronto: York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ben Néfissa, K. (2006). La théorie de Charles Nicolle sur l’histoire naturelle des maladies. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 83, 5–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanchard, R. (Ed.). (1902). Climat, hygiène et maladies. In Madagascar au début du XXème siècle (pp. 397–452). Paris: Société d’éditions scientifiques et littéraires.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bordier, A. (1884). La géographie médicale. Paris: C. Reinwald.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, T., & Moon, G. (2004). From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography. Journal of Historical Geography, 30, 747–763.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnet, E. (1912). Microbes and toxins. New York: Putnam’s son.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnet, F. M. (1936). Inapparent virus infections: With special reference to Australian examples. British Medical Journal, 1, 99–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chadli, A. (1986). Charles Nicolle et les acquis de sa pensée scientifique. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 63(1), 9–15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dedet, J.-P. (2000). Les Instituts Pasteurs d’outre-mer. Cent vingt ans de microbiologie française dans le monde. Paris: L’Harmattan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dedet, J.-P. (2013). Edmond et Étienne Sergent et l’épopée de l’Institut Pasteur d’Alger. Pézenas: Domens.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delage, A. (2006). Hervé Harant (1901–1986). In I. Humphrey-Smith (Ed.), The French school of parasitology/Sept siècles de parasitologie en France (pp. 206–211). Paris: Société Française de Parasitologie.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dias de Avila-Pires, F. (2004). Medical ecology. Journal of Human Ecology, 12, 97–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dubos, R. J. (1959). Medical utopias. Daedalus, 88, 410–424.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dworkin, J., & Tan, S. Y. (2012). Charles Nicolle (1866–1936): Bacteriologist and conqueror of typhus. Singapore Medical Journal, 52, 764–765.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farley, J. (1989). Parasites and the germ theory of disease. The Milbank Quarterly, 67, 50–68.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garnham, P. C. C. (1977). Charles Nicolle and inapparent Infections. American Journal of Tropical Medicine, 26, 1101–1104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gayon, J. (1995). Les premiers pastoriens et l’hérédité. Bulletin d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences de la vie, 2, 193–204.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geison, G. (1972). Louis Pasteur. In C. C. Gillispie (Ed.), The dictionary of scientific biography (Vol. 10, pp. 350–416). New York: Scribner’s Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geison, G. (1995). The private science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giroud, P. (unpublished). L’expérimentation dans le bled tunisien, ce que nous y avons vu, les conséquences lointaines de la pensée de Nicolle. In Pierre N. (Ed.), La vie passionnée de Charles Nicolle. Fonds Maurice Huet, Archives de l’Institut Pasteur, Paris.

  • Gradmann, C. (2010). Robert Koch and the invention of the carrier state: Tropical medicine, veterinary infections and epidemiology around 1900. Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 41, 232–240.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gradmann, C. (2014). A spirit of rigour: Koch’s postulates in twentieth-century medicine. Microbes and Infection, 16, 885–892.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gradmann, C. (2016). Medical bacteriology: Microbes and disease, 1870–2000. In M. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge history of disease (pp. 378–401). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Griffith, F. (1928). The significance of pneumococcal types. Journal of Hygiene, 27, 113–159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1946). À la recherche des sources: Discours inaugural de la chaire d’Histoire naturelle médicale et parasitologie. Montpellier Médical, 7, 1–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1953). Les épidémies. Paris: PUF.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1962). La notion d’impasse en parasitologie: Son incidence dans les éosinophilies tissulaires. Bulletin de la Société de Pathologie Exotique, 55, 576–582.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1966a). Charles Nicolle: ‘Inventeur’ de l’écologie médicale. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 43, 323–330.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1966b). De l’histoire naturelle à l’écologie. Bulletin de l’Association des Professeurs de Biologie et Géologie, 2, 19–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1966c). De l’histoire naturelle à l’écologie. Font Vive, 11, 19–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1967). Organisation et fonctionnement de la Chaire de Parasitologie et Pathologie exotique de Montpellier depuis l’Intégration. Journal de Médecine de Montpellier, 2, 174–175. (Pages given in the text are from the off-print).

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1968). Cinquante ans de parasitologie de la langue française. Conférence inaugurale du Colloque de Parasitologie de Montpellier en 1967. Annales de Parasitologie Humaine et Comparée, 43, 105–115.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H. (1969). Zoonoses et adaptation parasitaire. Bulletin de la Société de Pathologie Exotique, 62, 229–247.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H., & Brygoo, E. (1950). Les avenues du parasitisme. La Revue Médicale de France, 8, 3–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H., & Jarry, D. (1957). Écologie et médecine: Un chapitre d’histoire naturelle. Revue Médicale de France, 11–12, 375–402.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H., & Rioux, J.-A. (1956a). Aperçu général sur les ‘complexes pathogènes’ du midi méditerranéen. Revue de Pathologie Générale et de Physiologie Clinique, 674, 70–75.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H., & Rioux, J.-A. (1956b). Les diagnostics de laboratoire en parasitologie. Montpellier Médical, 49, 401–421.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harant, H., et al. (1951). Biocénose et parasitologie médicale. Note préliminaire. Comptes rendus des séances de la Société de Biogéographie, 245, 149–151.

    Google Scholar 

  • Honigsbaum, M. (2016). ‘Tipping the balance’: Karl Friedrich Meyer, latent infections, and the birth of modern ideas of disease ecology. Journal of the History of Biology, 49, 261–309.

    Google Scholar 

  • Honigsbaum, M. (2017). René Dubos, tuberculosis, and the ‘ecological facets of virulence’. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 39, 15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hueber, J.-J. (1996). Entretiens d’humanistes: Correspondance de Charles Nicolle et Georges Duhamel, 1922–1936. Rouen: Académie des Sciences, Belles-lettres et Arts de Rouen.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huet, M. (1995). Le pommier et l’olivier: Charles Nicolle, une biographie (1866–1936). Montpellier: Sauramps.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huxley, J. (1942). Evolution: The modern synthesis. London: Allen and Unwin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, S. (2017). Population cycles, disease, and networks of ecological knowledge. Journal of the History of Biology, 50, 357–391.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, S., & Amramina, A. (2018). Entangled histories of plague ecology in Russia and the USSR. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 40, 49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1988). The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loison, L. (2011). French roots of neo-Lamarckism in France, 1879–1985. Journal of History of Biology, 44, 713–744.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lot, G. (1953). Charles Nicolle et la biologie conquérante. Paris: Seghers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maulitz, R. (1979). ‘Physicians versus bacteriologists’: The ideology of science in clinical medicine. In M. J. Vogel & C. E. Rosenberg (Eds.), The therapeutic revolution: Essays in the social history of American medicine (pp. 91–107). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mendelsohn, J. A. (1998). From eradication to equilibrium: How epidemics became complex after world war I. In C. Lawrence & G. Weisz (Eds.), Greater than the parts: Holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950 (pp. 303–331). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mendelsohn, J. A. (2001). Medicine and the making of bodily inequality in twentieth-century Europe. In J.-P. Gaudillière & I. Löwy (Eds.), Heredity and infection: A history of disease transmission (pp. 21–79). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mendelsohn, J. A. (2002). ‘Like all that lives’: Medicine and bacteria in the age of Pasteur and Koch. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 24, 3–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mendelsohn, J. A. (2016). Message in a bottle: The business of vaccines and the nature of heredity after 1880. In S. Müller-Wille & C. Brandt (Eds.), Heredity explored: between public domain and experimental science, 1850–1930 (pp. 243–263). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meri, T., Cutler, S. J., Blom, A. M., Meri, S., & Jokiranta, T. S. (2006). Relapsing fever spirochetes Borrelia recurrentis and B. duttonii acquire complement regulators C4b-binding protein and factor H. Infection and Immunity, 74, 4157–4163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mesnil, F. (1936). Notice nécrologique sur M. Charles Nicolle (1866–1936). Bulletin de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine, 115, 541–549.

    Google Scholar 

  • Méthot, P.-O. (2012). Why do parasites harm their host? On the origin and legacy of Theobald Smith’s ‘law of declining virulence’—1900–1980. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 34(4), 561–601.

    Google Scholar 

  • Méthot, P.-O. (2016a). Bacterial transformation and the origins of epidemics in the interwar period: The epidemiological significance of Fred Griffith’s ‘transforming experiment’. Journal of the History of Biology, 49, 311–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Méthot, P.-O. (2016b). Writing the history of virology in the twentieth century: Discovery, disciplines, and conceptual change. Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 59, 145–153.

    Google Scholar 

  • Méthot, P.-O. (2018). L’œuvre du naturaliste-médecin Hervé Harant (1901–1986): Un chapitre d’histoire de la pensée biologique à Montpellier. Annales de la Société d’Horticulture et d’Histoire Naturelle de l’Hérault, 157, 92–112.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer, K. F. (1936). Latent infections. Journal of Bacteriology, 31, 109–135.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mobius, K. R. (1883). The oyster and oyster culture. In Report for 1880, U.S. Fish Commission. Washington, DC.

  • Mollaret, H. H. (1986). Un cinquantenaire: la mort de Charles Nicolle et le ‘Destin des maladies infectieuses’. Médecine et Maladies Infectieuses, 4, 191–192.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moulin, A.-M. (1992). La métaphore vaccine. De l’innoculation à la vaccinologie. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 14, 271–297.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moulin, A.-M. (1994). Charles Nicolle, savant tunisien. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 71, 355–370.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moulin, A.-M. (1996). Tropical medicine without the tropics: the turning-point of Pastorian medicine in north Africa. In D. Arnold (Ed.), Warm climates and western medicine, 1500–1900 (pp. 160–180). Amsterdam: Clio Medica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C. (1925). Contribution à l’étude des infections inapparentes. Le typhus inapparent (premier mémoire). Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 14, 149–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C. (1928). Nobel lecture: Investigations on typhus. Nobelprize.org. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1928/nicolle-lecture.html. Accessed 20 Dec 2018.

  • Nicolle, C. (1930). Naissance, vie et mort des maladies infectieuses. Paris: Félix Alcan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C. (1934). La nature: Conception et morale biologiques. Paris: Alcan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C. (1935). Hommage à E. Pavlovsky, professeur de zoologie de l’Académie de médecine militaire de Leningrad. In Parasites and vectors poisonous animals: A collection of papers dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the scientific activities Prof. Yevgeny Pavlovsky, 1909–1934. Moscow, Leningrad: VIEM.

  • Nicolle, C. (1939). Destin des maladies infectieuses. Paris: Alcan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., Blaizot, L., & Conseil, E. (1912a). Étiologie de la fièvre récurrente: Son mode de transmission par le pou. Compte rendus de l’Académie des sciences, 154, 1636–1638.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., Blaizot, L., & Conseil, E. (1912b). Conditions de transmission de la fièvre récurrente par le pou. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, 155, 481–484.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., Blaizot, L., & Conseil, E. (1914–1916). Études sur la fièvre récurrente, poursuivies à l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, Deuxième mémoire. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 9, 69–83.

  • Nicolle, C., & Blanc, G. (1914). Les spirilles de la fièvre récurrente sont-ils virulents aux phases successives de leur évolution chez le pou? Démonstration de leur virulence à un stage invisible. Compte Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, 158, 1815–1817.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., & Lebailly, C. (1919). L’évolution des spirochètes de la fièvre récurrente chez le pou, telle qu’on peut la suivre sur les coupes en série de ces insectes. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences, 169, 934–936.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., & Lebailly, C. (1919–1920). Les infections expérimentales inapparentes. Exemples tirés de l’étude du typhus exanthématique. Archives de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis, 11, 1–5.

  • Nicolle, C., & Manceaux, L. (1908). Sur une infection à corps de Leishman (ou organismes voisins) du gondi. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, 147, 763.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, C., & Manceaux, L. (1909). Sur un protozoaire nouveau du gondi. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, 148, 369.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicolle, M. (1901). Éléments de microbiologie générale. Paris: Octave Doin.

    Google Scholar 

  • O’Malley, M. A. (2018). The experimental study of bacterial evolution and its implications for the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Journal of the History of Biology, 51, 319–354.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, M. A. (2000). The geographical imperative in nineteenth-century French medicine. Medical History, 20, 31–50. (Supplement).

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, M. A. (2005). Science and the French empire. Isis, 96, 80–87.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, M. A. (2008). Raphaël Blanchard, parasitology, and the positioning of medical entomology in Paris. Parasitologia, 50, 213–220.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, M. A. (2014). The emergence of tropical medicine in France. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, M. A. (2017). Parasitology, zoology, and society in France, ca. 1880–1920. In S. Lidgard & L. K. Nyhart (Eds.), Biological individuality: Integrating scientific, philosophical, and historical perspectives (pp. 206–224). Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pasteur, L. (1883). La vaccination charbonneuse: Réponse au docteur Koch par M. Pasteur. Revue Scientifique, 20, 74–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pavlovsky, E. N. (1937). Biocenological studies as applied to parasitological problems. Bulletin de l’Académie des Sciences U.R.S.S., 1385–1422 [in Russian, abstract in English].

  • Pavlovsky, E. N. (1966). Natural nidality of transmissible diseases. Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pelis, K. (1997). Prophet for profit in French North Africa: Charles Nicolle and the Pasteur institute of Tunis, 1903–1936. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 71, 583–622.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pelis, K. (2006). Charles Nicolle, Pasteur’s imperial missionary: Typhus and Tunisia. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sapp, J. (2005). The prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy: Meaning and mythology. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 69, 292–305.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schultz, M. G., & Morens, D. (2008). Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 15, 1520–1522.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simon, D. (2016). Quand un concept écologique fait date: L’invention du ‘complexe pathogène’ en géographie. Revue d’histoire des Sciences Humaines, Publications de la Sorbonne, 28, 253–272.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, T. (1904). Some problems in the life history of pathogenic microorganisms. Science, 20, 817–832.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, T. (1921). Parasitism as a factor in disease. Transactions of the Association of American Physicians, 36, 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, T. (1931). Disease as a biological problem. Bulletin of the Harvard Medical Alumni Associations, 5, 2–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sorre, M. (1933). Complexes pathogènes et géographie médicale. Annales de Géographie, 42, 1–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sorre, M. (1943). Les bases biologiques de la géographie humaine: Essai d’une écologie de l’homme. Paris: Armand Collin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soyer-Gobillard, M.-O. (2002). Scientific research at the laboratoire Arago (Banyuls, France) in the twentieth century: Edouard Chatton, the ‘master’, and André Lwoff, the ‘pupil’. International Microbiology, 5, 37–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Théodoridès, J. (1954). Parasitisme et écologie. Biologie Médicale, 43, 440–463.

    Google Scholar 

  • Théodoridès, J. (1977). À propos du centenaire d’Émile Brumpt. Clio Médica, 12, 269–278.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tilley, H. (2011). Africa as a living laboratory: Empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Valençius, C. B. (2000). Histories of medical geography. In N. A. Rupke (Ed.), Medical geography in historical perspective (pp. 3–28). London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolbach, S. B. (1947). Biographical memoir of Hans Zinsser, 1878–1940. National Academy of Sciences, 24, 323–360.

    Google Scholar 

  • Worboys, M. (1983). The emergence and development of parasitology. In K. S. Warren & J. Z. Bowers (Eds.), Parasitology: A global perspective (pp. 1–18). New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Worboys, M. (1988). Manson, Ross and colonial medicine policy: Tropical medicine in London and Liverpool, 1899–1914. In M. Lewis & R. MacLeod (Eds.), Disease, medicine and empire: Perspectives on western medicine and the experience of European expansion (pp. 21–37). New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yoeli, M. (1967). Charles Nicolle and the frontiers of medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 276, 670–675.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zinsser, H. (1930). Rats, lice, and history (p. 1930). Boston: Little Brown.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zinsser, H. (1936). Biographical memoir of Theobald Smith, 1859–1934. National Academy of Sciences, 17, 1936.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zinsser, H. (1940). As I remember him: The biography of R.S. Boston: Little Brown.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Versions of this article were presented at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva (2015); during a session at the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology conference in Montreal (2015); at the conference “Making Microbes Complexe: Parasites, Epidemics and the Intellectual Origins of Disease Ecology” at Queen Mary University in London (2016); and as a keynote lecture on the occasion of the annual retreat of the Pasteur-Paris University (PPU) doctoral programme in microbiology at Le Touquet, Paris-Plage (2018). This article benefited greatly from the comments and feedback of the participants at these different events. I am especially grateful to Warwick Anderson, Jon Arrizabalaga, Christoph Gradmann, Mark Honigsbaum, Anne-Marie Moulin, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Kim Pelis for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Thanks also to Susan Jones for directing me to the concepts of Pavlovsky and to Anna Amramina for her help in retrieving the Nicolle-Pavlovsky’s correspondence at the Academy of the Sciences in St-Petersburg. At the Pasteur Institute, I am grateful to Daniel Demellier and Geneviève Milon for guiding me through the papers and the thought of Charles Nicolle and Hervé Harant; and Michäel Davy for his permission to use the Nicolle photographs. In Montpellier, my thanks go to Jean-Pierre-Dedet for providing access to Harant’s collection of published and unpublished manuscripts and for his useful comments on an earlier draft. This paper was mostly written during research stays at the Institute for the Humanities in Medicine (IHM) in Lausanne in the summer of 2015, 2016, and 2017. I would like to thank Vincent Barras, director of IHM, and Maïka Casse, librairian, for her help in locating Nicolle’s and Harant’s articles. Generous financial support of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture is gratefully acknowledge.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculté de Philosophie, Université Laval, Pavillon Félix Antoine Savard, 2325, rue des Bibliothèques, Quebec City, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Pierre-Olivier Méthot

Authors
  1. Pierre-Olivier Méthot
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pierre-Olivier Méthot.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Méthot, PO. ‘Birth, life, and death of infectious diseases’: Charles Nicolle (1866–1936) and the invention of medical ecology in France. HPLS 41, 2 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-018-0238-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-018-0238-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation