Charles Nicolle

Charles Jules Henri Nicolle (1866 to 1936) was a French bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. Born in Rouen to a middle-class family, he took his medical degree from the Pasteur Institute of Paris in 1893 and then returned to Rouen, where he directed the bacteriological laboratory from 1896 to 1902. Increasingly deaf, he turned toward laboratory work, and in 1903 he became director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, where he conducted his Nobel Prize winning work on typhus. Under his guidance over the next 33 years the Tunis institute became an international centre for the production of vaccines and for medical research, and he was still its director when he died in 1936.