Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Charles Nicolle

Charles Nicolle

Lived 1866 – 1936.

Charles Nicolle was the sole recipient of the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about typhus, including how to stop it spreading. Nicolle made a further crucial contribution to infectious disease research when he discovered inapparent infections: these are cases where an individual is infected with a disease and spreads it without falling ill.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Charles Jules Henry Nicolle was born into a middle-class family in the city of Rouen, France on September 21, 1866.

Charles’s mother was Marie Louise Aline Louvrier. His father was Eugène Edouard Nicolle, a university professor and hospital doctor. The couple had three sons, all of whom enjoyed outstanding careers: Charles’s older brother Maurice became a renowned microbiologist, while his younger brother Marcel became an art critic, museum curator, and recipient of the French Legion of Honor.

Education in a Boring City

Charles attended Pierre Corneille High School in Rouen. He loved studying literature and history, but his father encouraged him and his brothers to spend more time on science: he made the subject interesting for them, passing on his own enthusiasm. The result was that two of the three brothers became eminent scientists.

Charles did not enjoy living in Rouen – he considered it, and most of its citizens, dull and boring. He spent his spare time reading – especially books that allowed his mind to wander far from his hometown: he loved travel books, history books, fairy stories, and Jules Vernes’ fantasy stories.

Despite his disdain for Rouen, at age 18, Charles Nicolle began studying medicine at its university’s medical school.

Paris and the Pasteur Institute

In 1887, age 21, Nicolle moved to Paris to serve as an intern in its hospitals. In January 1889, he joined the Pasteur Institute to carry out microbiology research. The institute was still very new – it had been inaugurated just two months previously. Nicolle studied chancroid, a sexually transmitted disease, which became the subject of his doctoral thesis in 1893.

Back to Boring Rouen

In the spring of 1894, age 27, Nicolle returned to Rouen as a hospital doctor and substitute professor at the medical school. In 1896, he was promoted to director of the bacteriological laboratory. During this time he experienced a hearing loss, which meant he could no longer use a stethoscope to assess patients’ health.

Understanding Typhus

In January 1903, age 37, Nicolle left France and arrived in Tunisia, which was then a French colony. He had been appointed director of the Pasteur Institute in the city of Tunis. It was here he would make his great discoveries about epidemic typhus.

Nicolle had very little experience of this disease in France. Soon he was observing multiple cases in Tunisia, where the disease regularly broke out in rural areas in winter then spread to the city, particularly into prisons and flophouses.

He made understanding typhus his top priority.

Epidemic Typhus

The word typhus applies to several different diseases. Epidemic typhus is often simply called typhus. Historically the disease claimed millions of human lives. Outbreaks were strongly associated with impoverished people living in overcrowded, unhygienic conditions, warzones, prison camps, and refugee camps.

Typhus causes fever in its victims along with a rash and severe muscle pain. It also affects the brain, resulting in confusion, delirium, and stupor.

A notorious outbreak took place during the Russian Civil War, when in 1920 three million people died of typhus. Typhus was the main natural killer in Nazi concentration camps during World War 2.

lice and typhus

A Russian poster from 1919 warns of the dangers of lice, infections, and death. Image courtesy Wellcome Collection.

Many Names, All Deadly

Epidemic typhus has been given a variety of names through history including jail fever, hospital fever, ship fever, famine fever, trench fever, and camp fever. Untreated it is fatal in 10%-60% of patients. Epidemics no longer occur, but the disease is endemic in cold regions of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. The case fatality rate in modern times is 1%-20%.

A Brush with Death

Six months after he arrived in Tunis, Nicolle arranged to visit a prison to study typhus in the inmates. A day before the visit was scheduled he began coughing blood. Two his colleagues went in his place. Nicolle recovered from whatever had made him cough blood. The two who visited the prison were less fortunate – both died of typhus.

A Clue

Nicolle abandoned his plans to visit the prison, instead visiting Tunis’s native hospital. After studying typhus patterns there, he noticed something important. Typhus patients being treated in the hospital’s ward did not spread typhus: doctors and nurses in the wards were safe from it.

However, staff who met the patients before they were admitted were not safe from infection. Administrative staff who met patients before they were admitted could become infected. Significantly, laundry staff could also catch typhus even though they never met the patients. Staff who took patients’ everyday clothing from them before the patients were washed were also at risk.

Deduction

Nicolle realized the disease was not spread by people, but was spread by something on their clothes. Patients were always stripped of their clothes and washed with soap and water before they were admitted to a ward and these patients were no longer infectious. The disease seemed to be carried on people’s clothes, skin, and hair. Nicolle concluded that the disease was spread by lice.

 louse

The louse – a blood-sucking parasite. The image above was the first ever microscopic view of a louse. It was drawn by Robert Hooke and included in his revolutionary book Micrographia, published in 1667. Typhus is spread by the human body louse, Pediculus humanus corporis.

Typhus is more likely to strike large numbers of people during the cold season when people live in more crowded, unhygienic conditions, allowing lice to spread from person to person more rapidly.

Experimental Proof

To prove that lice carry typhus, Nicolle carried out experiments between June and August 1909. He:

  • Transferred blood from a human suffering from typhus to a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee got a fever, indicating it was infected.
  • He transferred blood from the chimpanzee to a macaque (a monkey). The macaque got a fever, indicating it was infected.
  • He took lice grown on the macaque and placed them on other macaques, which became infected. Lice had spread the disease.

Later Nicolle discovered that guinea pigs could also be infected, but the disease was not fatal for them. This allowed him to maintain a constant supply of the disease in guinea pigs for further research. Lice could not be kept for this purpose, because the disease actually kills them too.

Vaccination

Nicolle discovered that blood serum from patients who had survived and were recovering from typhus could be used as a temporary vaccine against typhus. Doctors and nurses who were vaccinated in this way were immune from the disease, but not for long.

Louse Excrement

Between 1910 and 1914, Nicolle and his colleagues in Tunis proved that typhus is carried in louse excrement. Anyone carrying infected lice who scratches themselves picks up louse excrement on their fingers and fingernails. The disease enters their bodies if they rub their eyes, which are particularly susceptible to the infectious agent, or scratch their skin.

Lives Saved

Nicolle’s discovery immediately ended typhus epidemics in the western world. Simply put, no lice means no typhus. Keeping people free of lice meant keeping them free of the disease. The enormous death toll in World War 1 would probably have been far worse but for Nicolle’s discovery.

The Infectious Agent

Nicolle did not discover the infectious agent that causes typhus. In 1916, Henrique da Rocha Lima established that the disease is caused by the bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii.

Nobel Prize

Nicolle was the sole recipient of the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his work on typhus.”

Hans Zinsser“Nicolle was one of those men who achieve their success by long preliminary thought, before an experiment is formulated, rather than by the frantic and often ill-conceived experimental activities that keep lesser men in ant-like agitation… In the case of the louse discovery, Nicolle had carried out no more than a half-dozen decisive experiments after years of observation of the disease and its epidemiology. In this instance, his experiments were easily confirmed.”

Hans Zinsser, 1878–1940, Bacteriologist
Rats, Lice, and History; 1935
 
warning about lice and typhus

An American poster from World War 2 warns about lice and typhus.

Inapparent Infections – Nicolle’s Most Important Work

While researching typhus, Nicolle found that some guinea pigs could carry the disease in their blood but never show any symptoms. Lice from these guinea pigs could infect others causing them to become ill with typhus. Nicolle then discovered other infectious diseases could be carried in the same way, the disease spread by apparently healthy individuals. This was a vital development in untangling the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Nicolle regarded it as his most important scientific discovery.

Be Grateful that Microbes Are Not Intelligent

Discussing microbes, especially viruses, with a colleague Nicolle said:

Charles Nicolle“These microorganisms do not have any brain, not even a miniscule fraction of it. If they would have any understanding, or even minimal intelligence, they would be able to promptly destroy and annihilate human populations on this planet.”

Charles Nicolle
Conversation with Ludwik Gross, 1934
 

Honors

In 1958, France issued a stamp to commemorate Charles Niccole.

1927: Institute of Paris Osiris Prize
1928: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1929: Elected Member of the French Academy of Science
1931: Commander of the French Legion of Honor
1932: Elected Professor of the College of France

Family and The End

In October 1895, age 29, Nicolle married 21-year-old Alice Louise Avice. They had a daughter and a son: Marcelle and Pierre. Pierre became a biologist.

After leaving France in 1903, Nicolle worked for the rest of his life as director of the Pasteur Institute in the city of Tunis. Unfortunately, the deafness that started when he was a young man grew progressively worse, making it increasingly difficult for Nicolle to enjoy any social life.

He never lost his love of history and literature. He wrote a number of novels including The Two Thieves, The Pleasures of Boredom, and Marmouse and his Guests.

Charles Nicolle died aged 69 on February 28, 1936. He was buried in a tomb at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
© All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Charles Nicolle." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 30 Sep. 2018. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/charles-nicolle/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
Various Authors
En l’honneur du 25e anniversaire de direction de l’Institut Pasteur de Tunis du Docteur Charles Nicolle: 1903-1927
Pasteur Institute, Tunis, April 1928

Ludwik Gross
How Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute Discovered That Epidemic Typhus Is Transmitted by Lice: Reminiscences from My Years at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol. 93, pp. 10539–10540, October 1996

World Health Organization
Typhus: Epidemic Louse-Borne Typhus
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs162/en/, May 1997

Myron G. Schultz and David M. Morens
Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle
Emerging Infectious Diseases. Vol. 15(9), pp. 1519–1522, 2009

Colin Heywood
Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic
Cambridge University Press, Feb 2007

Creative Commons
Image of Russian health warning courtesy of Wellcome Images under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Francesco Redi
    Francesco Redi
  • Youyou Tu
    Youyou Tu
  • Rudolf Virchow
    Rudolf Virchow
  • Louis Pasteur
    Louis Pasteur
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2023