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Reviewed by:
  • Charles Nicolle, Pasteur's Imperial Missionary: Typhus and Tunisia
  • Ellen Amster, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History
Kim Pelis . Charles Nicolle, Pasteur's Imperial Missionary: Typhus and Tunisia. Rochester, New York, University of Rochester Press, 2006. 384 pp., illus.

Passionate, lucidly written, and carefully researched, Pelis' history of Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Dr. Charles Nicolle and his tenure as director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis (1903-36) reveals the global nature of Pasteurian medicine and its role in French colonialism. Through Nicolle, Pelis shows how colonial Pasteurian institutes expanded Pasteurian method itself in the twentieth century. Pelis' social history brings to life an international network of scientists and their professional struggles; medical knowledge did not diffuse in an inevitable "march of progress" from metropole to empire. After Albert Calmette founded the first overseas Pasteur Institute in Saigon in 1891, Pasteurians in Algeria, Tunisia, Madagascar, Brazzaville, and Morocco built an independent intellectual world through journals like Archives de l'Institut Pasteur de Tunis and La Tunisie Médicale, which Nicolle founded in 1906 and 1911. Charles Nicolle embodied the scientific civilizing mission of the Third Republic. In his Nobel speech, he declared "Typhus presents itself to us both as a plague and a moral lesson," for civilization alone could control the typhus louse and protect man from disease and barbarism (191 ).

Charles Nicolle's typhus research was possible precisely because he was far from Paris. Typhus had been banished to the metropolitan margins through public hygiene, but its etiology remained unknown. The doctrine of disease specificity ("one specific microbe causes one specific disease") and the methods of the Paris laboratory could not grasp this "filterable virus" which "[was] too small to be seen under standard microscopes, and could not be cultivated outside a host" (11). Nicolle bent the classical postulates of German bacteriologist Robert Koch to consider "inapparent infection:" the host suffers virulence but manifests no symptoms and builds a weak immunity (147). Nicolle reconceptualized the microbe as a "mosaic of powers" in a "vast botanical group" that mutated to conserve its life, [End Page 128] "the adaptation of a microbe to an animal species is called virulence" (187). New diseases were born through the chance mutation of microbial species (223-24). These revolutionary ideas opened a new path for vaccine development and led to a vaccine after Nicolle's death.

Pelis' writing reflects her work at the Wellcome Institute and with French medical historians. Charles Nicolle's struggle with the typhus louse recalls Bruno Latour's (The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) microbe-as-historical-actor, "What [Nicolle] did not expect. . .was the extent to which typhus and Tunisia would. . .reshape his identity" (xvii). Pelis extends Anne-Marie Moulin's metaphor of the Pasteurian institutes as a religious order: Pasteurian "initiates" applied the "gospel" of microbiology in their "churches," local colonial laboratories. Pelis writes "each of the filials even had a share of the 'one true' rabies vaccine, thus mirroring Catholic churches boasting splinters of the 'one true cross'" (7). Nicolle deviated from Pasteur's doctrines to consider the evolution of disease species and biology of the disease entity, its "birth, life and death." But Nicolle was a reformer, not a heretic. He critiqued the maison mere (the Parisian Pasteurian Institute) but adhered to Pasteurian method. As he wrote, "I am a captive who complains of his prison, but who perhaps could not live outside of it."

The science in the book is solid and clearly elucidated. The neophyte walks away with a thorough grasp of lice-transmitted diseases and their study, both typhus and a spirochete-based, lice-transmitted relapsing fever that foreshadowed Nicolle's typhus work. Nicolle and his colleague Blaizot found relapsing fever spirochetes were not communicated through bites or droppings after subjecting a hapless Tunisian "volunteer" to more than 9,000 louse bites. Applying the ultramicroscopic techniques of British microbiologist William Boot Leishman, Nicolle and Blaizot realized the spirochetes entered the patient when he scratched and broke the louse's exoskeleton. The louse's interior liquid entered open skin. The host-germ relationship and the ability of spirochetes to become invisible through disaggregation led Nicolle to conceptualize typhus as...

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