CME INDIA Presentation by ⚜ Dr. M. Gowri Sankar, MD, Senior Assistant Professor, Dept. of General Medicine, Government Medical College and ESI Hospital, Coimbatore.
Today’s History Feature:
Dr. Charles Nicolle
(Sep 21,1866 – Feb 28,1936)
💠French Bacteriologist
His contributions…
🔹Nicolle was born to a physician father. As, he was very eager in learning biology, he learned the best from his father. Due to the will of his father, Nicolle studied medicine and received his M.D. graduation in 1893 from the Pasteur Institute, Paris.
🔹After completion of his studies, he began his career in the field of bacteriology and in a short period of three years, he became the Head of the bacteriology laboratory at Medical School of Rouen.
🔹Later in 1903, he became the Director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, North America and continued in that post till his last days.
🔹Simultaneously, Nicolle was doing his investigations on infectious diseases among the native southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He is remembered for his work on Epidemic Typhus – which was a devastating disease of humans in the early 20th century.
🔹Furthermore, he was the first who revealed that body lice as the vector for this disease.
🔹In fact, his revelation was the beginning to the end of epidemic typhus. Hence the successful De-lousing camp was organized by using DDT and thereby many lives were saved. Also, thousands of soldiers were saved during the First World War by establishing delousing stations.
🔹He further discovered a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii causing Toxoplasmosis.
🔹Also, he was the first to culture Leishmania tropica from the oriental sore through the well famous NNN (Novy-MCNeal-Nicolle) medium, which is still in use.
🔹Moreover, he carried out his extensive research and made many other fundamental contributions to the knowledge of infectious diseases such as Malta fever, tick fever, scarlet fever, measles, rinderpest, influenza and trachoma.
🔹Besides, Nicolle was a great writer. Other than his several writing on medical publications, he was a philosopher, poet and scholar. Also, a novelist who published several novels.
🔹Eventually, Nicolle was honoured with Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine in 1928 for his identification of Lice as the vector of epidemic typhus.
A Day to Commemorate…
A Physician Who is Celebrated as Second Pasteur
Dr. Charles Nicolle 🙏🏼
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