Responsabilites de la Medecine

Paris: Felix Alcan, 1935. First edition.

GUIDE TO THE MEDICAL STUDENT BY FRENCH NOBELIST WHO DISCOVERED THE VECTOR OF TYPHUS--SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY.

12x18.5 cm volume in publisher's brown printed paper covers, inscribed and signed on half title, "a mon ami O. Duborcq et pensee affectueuse. C Nicolle". i-viii, 210 pp, Contents. Light soil to covers, age-toning to pages, foxing to endpapers. Very good in custom archival mylar cover. INTRODUCTION: "Ce volume contient la seconde serie des lecons de la troisteme ann6e d'enseignement de M. Charles Nicolle au College de France. II est consacre aux Responsabilites de la Medecine." [This volume contains the second series of lessons from the third year of teaching of Mr. Charles Nicolle at the Collège de France. It is devoted to the Responsibilities of Medicine.]

CHARLES NICOLLE (1866 – 1936) was a French bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. He received his medical degree from the Pasteur Institute of Paris in 1893. At this point he returned to Rouen, as a member of the Medical Faculty until 1896 and then as Director of the Bacteriological Laboratory from 1896 to 1902. In 1903 he became Director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis where he conducted his Nobel Prize-winning work on typhus. Under Nicolle's guidance over the next 33 years, the 'sister' Institute in Tunis quickly became an international center of its own for the production of vaccines used against infectious diseases and for medical research. As the Institute grew more financially stable, Nicolle tackled the diseases and public health concerns that were prevalent in the local region, shared research findings and resources with the Paris Institute, and expanded his scientific writings into a journal called the Archives de l'Institut de Tunis. During this time, Nicolle also undertook two major projects that would come to define his role in the scientific community – the discovery of the mode of transmission of typhus (an infectious disease prevalent throughout North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin at that time) and the production of vaccines.

PROVENANCE: OCTAVE JOSEPH DUBOSCQ (1868 - 1943) was a French zoologist, mycologist and parasitologist. He obtained doctorates in medicine (1894) and sciences (1899) at the University of Caen. From 1904 to 1923, he was chair of zoology at the University of Montpellier, afterwards attaining the chair of marine biology at the Sorbonne. At the same time, he was also named director of the Arago laboratory in Banyuls-sur-Mer, and in 1931 became manager of the biological station at Villefranche-sur-Mer. He was a member of the Belles-Lettres de Montpellier (1906–1923) and of the Académie des Sciences. In 1912 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.