Travels of Alexandre Yersin: Letters of a Pastorian in Indochina, 1890-1894

TRAVELS OF ALEXANDRE YERSIN: LETTERS OF A PASTORIAN IN INDOCHINA, 1890-1894 JACK E. MOSELEY* Medicine today, in America and elsewhere, owes much to the microbe hunters of nineteenth-century Europe who established and propagated the germ theory. One of the lesser known but exceedingly versatile of these microbe hunters was the Swiss-born doctor Alexandre Yersin, codiscoverer of the diphtheria exotoxin and discoverer of the plague bacillus, whose genus is named in his honor [I]. This gifted physician —the protégé of Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux—left a legacy of nearly 1,000 letters, many over 10 pages long, which he had written to his mother. Detailing over 40 years of his life and work, the collection was discovered in Switzerland in 1970 by the doctor's descendants and donated to H. H. Mollaret, plague specialist of the Pasteur Institute of Paris. Dr. Mollaret made the letters available for translation by myself and publication in the United States. The following selections concern primarily the earlier biographical aspects of the correspondence, particularly those highlighting Yersin's remarkable experience as a ship's doctor, explorer, and cartographer in the Far East. The following letters have not previously been published. Alexandre Yersin (see fig. 1) was a small, quiet physician whose slender stature rarely measured above the shoulders of many of his nineteenth-century European contemporaries. It is, perhaps, understandable that some of his professional colleagues tried to dissuade him H. H. Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossollet of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, Albert Coblentz of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, Robert P. Hudson of the Department ofthe History of Medicine of the University of Kansas, Caroline Hannaway of the Institute of the History of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University, and Thomas K. Akers of the University of North Dakota served as historical advisers for this manuscript. Additional assistance in its preparation was provided by the Logan Clendening Traveling Fellowship in the History of Medicine and the following faculty and staffof the University of North Dakota: Lorraine Etti, Vonda Somerville, Colleen Kenefick, Lowell Gallagher, Claudine Moseley, and Brenda Perry. The manuscript is dedicated to Bessie F. Presley, 1905-1980.»Address: 2843 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.© 1981 by The University of Chicago. 0031-5982/81/2404-0249$01.00 Perspectives inBiology andMedicine · Summer 1981 | 607 from leaving a flourishing medical career in Paris in 1890 to pursue the rigors of exploration in colonial Indochina [2]. The 27-year-old physician had not once been to sea or traveled farther than to a few countries in Europe. The sketches of Paris he frequently sent to his mother in Switzerland were the only indication of the cartography skills he might possess for mapping the uncharted lands of which he dreamed [3]. Yersin was born in the French-speaking Canton of Vaud in Switzerland , on September 22, 1863. He came to Paris in 1885 to study medicine at the renowned Faculty of Medicine ofthe University ofParis. As a medical student, his decision to specialize in microbiology came to the attention of Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux, who became his inFig . 1.—Alexandre Yersin, circa 1894, wearing the medal of "la Légion d'honneur" awarded by the French government for his discovery of die plague bacillus in Hong Kong in June 1894. 608 J JackE. Moseley ¦ Travels ofAlexandre Yersin structors and mentors [3]. Yersin's doctoral thesis of 1888 described his work in experimentally induced septicemic tuberculosis, known later as "la tuberculose expérimentale, type Yersin" [3, p. 197]. Also in 1888, Roux and Yersin worked closely on a series of filtration experiments which led to history's first isolation of a bacterial toxin, the exotoxin of Corynebacterium diphtheria [3, p. 197]. In 4 ofthe 6 years that followed this discovery, Yersin traveled widely in Indochina as a colonial physician, explorer, and cartographer. He documented hisjourneys, and the days leading up to them in France, in biweekly letters to his mother in Morgès, Switzerland. His first-person accounts, as reproduced in the following passages, contribute to his biography, in particular to that 4-year period of transition and travel, 1890-1894, which prefigured his future medical career in...