Paul-Louis Simond

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Paul-Louis Simond
Drome, France
Died3 March 1947(1947-03-03) (aged 88)
NationalityFrench
Alma materÉcole du Santé Navale
Known forDiscovery of the role of the rat flea in the transmission of bubonic plague
AwardsGodard Thesis Prize (1887)
Barbier Prize (1898)
Legion of Honour (1901)
Scientific career
FieldsBiology, physician

Paul-Louis Simond (30 July 1858 – 3 March 1947) was a French physician, chief medical officer and biologist whose major contribution to science was his demonstration that the intermediates in the transmission of

Xenopsylla cheopis
that dwell on infected rats.

Early life

Paul-Louis Simond was born in

leprosarium in Acarouany near Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana,[1] where he contracted an attenuated form of yellow fever. He returned to Bordeaux in 1886 and the following year he received his medical doctorate with a prize-winning thesis on leprosy
.

Career

Paul-Louis Simond injecting plague vaccine June 4th 1898

In 1895 he began work at the

Elie Metchnikoff, he was the first to provide a comprehensive description of the sexual reproductive processes of Coccidia
. This work provided experimental support for the theory of evolutionary dimorphism which had been put forward by R. Pfeiffer.

In 1897, when

French Academy of Medicine
. His findings were not initially accepted by the scientific community, but were validated later by others and by 1907 his conclusions were accepted as scientific fact.

From 1898 to 1901 Simond served as director of the Pasteur Institute in

Knight of the Legion of Honour. From 1901 to 1905 he participated on a mission to study yellow fever in Brazil where he and his colleagues confirmed the results that the U.S. Army Commission led by Walter Reed had just obtained in Cuba. These revealed that the amaril virus is the pathogen present in the blood of patients, and that this virus can be conveyed to humans by the mosquito species, Stegomyia fasciata (later renamed Aedes aegypti).[3] In 1908-09 he conducted yellow fever research in Martinique. From 1911 to 1913 he served as Director of the Imperial Bacteriology Research Institute in Constantinople. In 1917, Simond was installed in Valence
to study tuberculosis.

Simond also had a keen interest in

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle
on 1947.

Death

Paul-Louis Simond died in Valence (Drôme, France) on 3 March 1947 at the age 88. After his death, a fellow biologist, René Dujarric de la Rivière, presented Simond's eulogy at the Academy of Medecine. There is a street in Valence named after him.

References

  1. PMID 11000942
    . Retrieved 18 February 2021.
  2. ^ Marc Simond, Margaret L. Godley, and Pierre D.E. Mouriquand (1998). “Paul-Louis Simond and his discovery of plague transmission by rat fleas: A centenary” J. Roy. Soc. Med., 91, 101-104.
  3. ^ "Office of Medical History".

Further reading