Charles Jules Henry Nicolle was a French bacteriologist who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. Nicolle was born on 21st September 1866.
After it was established that several diseases, including malaria, were spread by insects, suspicions arose that this might also be the case with typhus fever.
However, Nicolle suspected that the key point of typhus was unhygienic conditions. When patients were bathed, and their clothes were confiscated, the carrier of typhus in the patients’ clothes or on their skin could be removed. Charles Nicolle noticed that sick people ceased to infect others when they had an opportunity to keep themselves clean. In 1909, he demonstrated that body lice spread typhus fever by successfully transferring the infection among apes by allowing a body louse to first bite infected, and then uninfected, apes.
Nicolle was an Associate of l’Academie de Medecine. He was awarded the Montyon Prize in 1909, 1912, and 1914. He died in 1936.
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