Charles Nicolle: Pasteur's Imperial Missionary: Typhus and Tunisia (review)

Kim Pelis and the University of Rochester Press are to be congratulated for producing this elegant biography of one of the leading Pastorian researchers, Charles Nicolle of Rouen, Paris, and especially Tunis. An eccentric in a world known for them, Nicolle was clearly a lay Pastorian missionary, dedicating himself to French bacteriology, to conditions in colonial Tunisia, and particularly to the mysteries of typhus fever. In keeping with the Pastorian model, Nicolle ran a profitable vaccine service at the Pasteur Institute of Tunis (PIT) and directed research on a host of illnesses, dominated by typhus but including influenza, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and the animal infirmity of rinderpest.

Somewhat older than most of the Pastorians, Nicolle belonged to the first generation, though he met the grand old man, Louis, only once. He received the Nobel prize for his 1909 demonstration of the louse as the vector for typhus, but was not awarded the prize until 1928; in between, he found time to run the PIT from 1903 to his death in 1936 at age seventy. As chief scientist, Nicolle ran the Institute as a lay religious order, quarreling (like other directors) with the tendency of Émile Roux to concentrate research in the Pasteur "mother house" in Paris. He also found time to act as an eclectic tourist of his adopted country, and to write no fewer than seven published philosophical novels and eight formal scientific texts, plus articles and voluminous letters, some of which are now archived in Tunis, Paris, and his hometown of Rouen. Pelis in most instances was the first to consult this huge corpus, including personal correspondence with Hans Zinsser, author of Rats, Lice, and History (1935) and a fellow searcher after the truths behind typhus and other fevers.

Nicolle's recognition for typhus was well deserved. During the First World War, his breakthroughs saved lives on both sides of the conflict by keeping soldiers relatively louse free. Less fortunate were civilians, especially those in Serbia, Russia, and Poland, who could not afford bathing or the steam-treating of clothing to kill lice. As a true Pastorian, Nicolle pursued a typhus vaccine: he hoped simply to crush up the lice and mix them with blood serum from recovered patients; he tried this on himself and stayed healthy, but failed to produce an effective vaccine. He did not live long enough to participate even vicariously in the second golden age of Pastorianism, the development of "magic bullets" against typhus—the breakthroughs were DDT, which in 1942 proved a tremendous agent against lice, and then the broad-spectrum antibiotics after 1948 against the disease itself.

If there is a flaw in Pelis's approach, it is her tendency to see Nicolle as a unique figure. His achievements were not singular. For example, a younger Pastorian named Pierre Laigret worked for several years under Nicolle in Tunis, but then left for the Pasteur Institute in Dakar, where he made an important breakthrough in the development of an anti–yellow fever vaccine in the mid-1930s. Pelis is also silent on the stellar achievements of Georges Girard in developing an anti–bubonic plague vaccine in the Pasteur Institute of Tananarive, Madagascar, during the 1940s.

That said, Pelis uncannily captures the triumphs and defeats of this brilliant but difficult man. Nicolle's relations with others in the scientific community were not always harmonious. He was a sometimes-friendly rival in typhus research of Edmond Sergent, director of the Pasteur Institute in Algiers. His growing deafness contributed to his personal isolation, and in later years heart problems impeded his work. More than anything, this book should be of interest not only to those interested in colonial science, but in how science itself has dealt with ambiguity. Nicolle himself was never a convinced imperialist, and argued that education and especially medicine barely justified the French presence in Tunisia.

Nicolle was capable...