In the bright light of medical science's triumph over typhus in Tunisia, Ernest Conseil was haunted by a growing shadow of doubt. It was not that he had reservations about the transmission discovery per se: even if some medical researchers remained unpersuaded by evidence of the louse's unique role in spreading typhus, the insect was, Conseil believed, the disease's vector. It was the way the louse transmitted typhus that concerned him. Nicolle had announced with great fanfare that lice spread typhus by biting their victims. Indeed, he had waited to make his announcement about the path of typhus spread until he had successfully transmitted the disease between monkeys through louse bites. Nicolle had put great stock in this formulation for at least two reasons. First, as we have seen, he believed the bite experiment to be the final, crucial step in demonstrating the course taken by “nature” itself in spreading typhus. Second, he used it to substantiate a specific program of “rational hygiene” against the disease. Secure in the knowledge that typhus was propagated in nature only by the louse's bite—not by its droppings or, as he would soon assert, by hereditary transmission to offspring— Nicolle could confidently focus on killing living lice to control the disease. It is therefore understandable that, when Conseil approached him with his concerns, Nicolle was skeptical.

In the spring of 1914, a new collaborator arrived at the IPT. Georges Blanc had, like Ludovic Blaizot, worked in Blanchard's parasitology lab at the Paris Faculty of Medicine; like Blaizot, Blanc, too, was interested in spirochetes. His arrival in Tunisia corresponded with the “importation” of three typhus cases into Tunis, and Nicolle set him to work with Conseil to relieve the latter's nagging doubts about the route the disease took in moving from louse to human.

Laboratory manipulation of the virulence of pathogenic microbes had been a central component of the birth and life of Pastorian microbiology. Pasteur and his disciples had fashioned their assorted vaccines by exposing microbes to a variety of changed environmental conditions—heat, cold, air, and so on.They had also found that passage through animal hosts tended, eventually, to restore such artificially diminished virulence. Given this practical focus on microbial malleability (along with other cultural and certainly personal factors), it is unsurprising that Pasteur did not himself come up with a formula for a strict, “one microbe produces one disease” specificity. Pasteur and Koch roughly agreed on microbial specificity; Pasteur was simply willing to admit more flexibility within a species. Mazumdar has argued that it was Pasteur's disciple and successor at the institute's helm, Emile Duclaux, who attributed the “discovery” of disease specificity to Pasteur. In fact, as Geison notes, although Pasteur's interest in the manipulation of microbes did not go so far as challenging the borders of their “species,” he was, in theory, willing to push the borders of disease species still further, even suggesting that the relationships between hosts and parasites evolved over time—and that there would be new diseases. Emile Roux also raised the possibility of disease evolution in his Cours; however, neither he nor Pasteur pressed it much further. Charles Nicolle did.

In 1930, Nicolle published his classic treatise on disease evolution, Naissance,Vie et Mort des Maladies Infectieuses [NVM]. He wrote much of the book while recuperating from his long illness in 1929. In the text, the invisible forces of inapparent infection and inframicrobes found central positions— as did his father's natural-historical inclinations and his brother Maurice's immunological models.

On December 27, 1922, “the whole world” celebrated “the centenary of the birth of Pasteur.” Pasteur's son-in-law, René Vallery-Radot—who had already paid tribute to his wife's famous father by naming his son Louis Pasteur— helped set the festive international tone with his hagiographic article “Why the Whole World Glorifies Pasteur.” Colonial extension helped ensure that the chorus of “hosannas” found voice at the earth's four corners. In Tunisia, Vallery-Radot's article was read to all schoolchildren as part of an hour-long discussion of Pasteur's many contributions to humanity. To help them remember their lesson, the children were presented with a special commemorative plate, which was a gift of the Société des Sciences Médicales—joint sponsor, along with the Tunisian government and the IPT, of the country's grand fête. The day itself was celebrated by a series of conferences, held—most certainly to underscore the applications of Pasteur’s work far beyond medical realms—at the Agriculture School in Tunis, as well as in Sousse and Bizerte.The day also kicked off “Pastorian week” [“la semaine pastorienne”], which featured an exhibit on “Pasteur, his family, his disciples, and his work (photos, manuscripts etc.) organized by the Palais des Sociétés françaises.” A special subscription was opened to fund a bust of Pasteur and a scholarship for study at the IPT.

Although planning of the Tunisian celebration was shared by several organizations, Nicolle was clearly its prime mover. He was in constant contact with René Vallery-Radot's son, Louis Pasteur—“Pasteur,” as he was more commonly known—to procure the requisite photographs and other documents for the Pasteur exhibit. His own article, “The Way of Pasteur,” appeared in the Dépêche Tunisienne on December 27. This very public celebration evidently had deep personal significance for the director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunisia.

Vaccines and Analyses at the Pasteur Institute of Tunis

DIRECTEUR:

Charles Nicolle, 1903–[36]

DIRECTEUR ADJOINT:

Étienne Burnet, 1927–28

SOUS-DIRECTEUR:

Alfred Conor, 1909–14

Étienne Burnet, 1920–26

Charles Anderson, 1929–35

Lucien Balozet, 1931–35

CHEF(S) DE LABORATOIRE:*

Charles Comte, 1906–9

Albert Husson, 1906–8 (malaria service)

Ludovic Blaizot, 1910–21

Georges Blanc, 1913–20

Jean Bance, 1914–35

Charles Lebailly, 1917–18**

Louis Caillon, 1917–18**

Paul Durand, 1923–33

J. Colas-Belcour, 1928–30

Jean Laigret, 1931–35

Hélène Sparrow, 1933–35

Roger Durand, 1934

Pierre Nicolle, 1935

CHEF(S) DE LABORATOIRE, ADJOINT:

Gaston Catouillard, 1909–12, 1924–26

? Prevel, 1910

ASSISTANT:

Gaston Catouillard, 1913–23

PRÉPARATEURS:

Gaston Catouillard, 1906–8

? Boselli, 1906–8

Joseph Chaltiel, 1910–18

Alfred Jannot, 1912–18 (died in World War I)

? Loiselier, 1914–18, 1922–23

Mlle. Huret, 1924–35

Henri Roussel, 1925–35

Camille Disdier, 1925–35

René Lafont, 1925–35

Roger Chene, 1928, 1931–35

Salah Ounais, 1931–35

Jean Moulin, 1931–35

Magid Rahal, 1931–35

Georges Carre, 1934–35

AIDES-PRÉPARATEURS:

Chaltiel was the aide-préparateur during 1906–8; in 1909, he was joined in this position by Jannot. From 1909, the position was vacant, until five people—including Lafond, Roussel, and Huret, who later became préparateurs and remained at the Institute throughout Nicolle's tenure—were hired to fill the position. The number of aide-préparateurs varied between four and six in the years 1919–35.

In 1934, Nicolle published the final book in his biological/philosophical trilogy. La Nature: Conception et Morale Biologique [Nature] opens with the author's personal invitation to the reader to accompany him in his narrative explorations. More specifically, he summons the reader to join him at a window, looking out over “nature”: “We approach the window. I open it. Reader, you lean on the sill next to me.” Outside, the garden is coming to life; “beyond it, the sea gently stirs up its pebbles.” Inspired by the scene, Nicolle proclaims, “ ‘Nature is beautiful.’ You add,‘She is caring [aimant].’ “ Nicolle and his reader return to the window in winter.The cold wind chills them. “Now invisible, the roaring sea hurls its waves.” The garden is in ruins. “I say, ‘Truly nature is ugly.’You add,‘Worse, she is cruel to all living things.’ “ How, then, does one reconcile these contradictory observations, made of the same place, if in different times? “Beauty and benevolence; the ugliness and evil that we define as their opposites, are but the sentiments with which we clothe nature. Intelligence, absurdity: it is our human judgment that so labels it. Nature is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad. It does not know reason or illogic. It is.” It is from this “nature” that Nicolle, in the book Nature, seeks to explain human civilization. What, within such an animate but deanthropomorphized nature, could possibly give rise to logic and intuition, to perceptions of beauty, goodness, and truth, or to the visceral need for justice to prevail?

Three decades earlier, Nicolle had believed that human civilization could master nature. He had embraced the Baconian dream of a world in which knowledge, properly obtained, conferred such power. This dream not only gave force to his ideas of what might be achieved; it also helped propel both Pastorian and French civilizing missions. Long wary of reason detached from empirical observation, after World War I, Nicolle increasingly saw limitations in the power of scientific reasoning as well. Eventually, he emphasized the role of “intuition” in his formulation and added “equilibrium” to give it vital flexibility.This was his vision in Biologie. By the time Nature appeared, even this vision had paled.

Charles Nicolle is remembered today as the man who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, largely for his demonstration that the louse transmitted typhus. Outside France and Tunisia, he is principally remembered through his Nobel speech—and, from it, for the above discovery narrative.The “hospital” to which he referred was the Sadiki Hospital in Tunis, where Tunisian patients were treated.The moment when his revelatory walk took place is less clear. It may have been any time between 1903 and 1909. The best guess is 1906, but Nicolle never really specified. Also unclear is when Nicolle first came up with the “Door of the Sadiki” discovery narrative. He had published the articles demonstrating the louse's role as typhus vector in 1909, but he did not relate the discovery as a grand intuitive flash. Instead, he described it as the product of a collaborative effort between laboratory, clinic, and field, resting on multiple layers of evidence. It was only in the 1920s that Nicolle told the Sadiki story as a coherent public narrative about the “genius” of scientific discovery. It emerged in this “telescoped” form, I believe, out of an awkward convergence of personal ambition (fueled by assorted successes), colonial location (he was director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis), and a kind of socioreligious displacement that occurred in the wake of world war and that desperately sought new definitions for old faiths.

Outre-Mer

For historical reasons, Charles Nicolle was captivated by the town of Carthage in his newly adopted country of Tunisia. Its faded glory, its cultural heritage, came to inform his ideas about civilization and to animate his works of fiction. For more visually aesthetic reasons, though, he loved the village of Sidi Bou Saïd. “Sidi Bou” lay (as it does today) about 20 kilometers northeast of Tunis, on a hill overlooking the sea. There, drinking mint tea at a café, Nicolle would hold court, discussing the composition of the country's many ancient mosaics with archeologist friend Père Delattre, lamenting the perils of war with novelist friend Georges Duhamel, or composing articles on bacteriological research with his collaborators at the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. The sea was always in view. Nicolle was fond of the sea, not only as an object of visual beauty but also as a highly personal metaphor, a symbol of both treachery and salvation. Geographically, it acted at once as barrier and gateway between Europe and its “less civilized” neighbors. The Mediterranean Sea had been Nicolle's means of escape from what he considered the narrow-minded conservatism of his native Normandy; yet, at the same time, it was a most immediate source of his isolation from France. The eminently logical Nicolle was perched atop a sea of ambiguity, even of outright contradiction.

From the war years on, Nicolle enjoyed a steady stream of scientific visitors to his colonial institute. Members of the parasitology lab of the Faculté de Médecine de Paris—one of his favored providers of new collaborators—frequently came to Tunis to conduct research. In 1923, he welcomed Dr. Salvadore Mazza, Professor of Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine of Buenos Aires; two years later, Mazza played gracious host to Nicolle during his mission to Argentina. Yet another of Nicolle's frequent visitors was John Reenstierna. A professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Stockholm, Reenstierna initially came to the IPT in late 1922 as part of a mission for the Swedish government. He returned the following summer and again in 1926: the year he paid tribute to Nicolle at the Journées Médicales. Apparently, Reenstierna's public praise was backed up with private activism. It can hardly be a coincidence that Nicolle first found himself in the running for a Nobel Prize in the autumn of 1923. He wrote to Vallery-Radot:

Though the 1923 run for the Nobel was to prove unsuccessful, Reenstierna's efforts on Nicolle's behalf offer a striking example of the kinds of networks that the director-isolé managed to create between his Tunisian institute and the rest of the medico-scientific world.

At the same time that Nicolle was being invited to Mexico to provide his expertise on typhus to the growing international discussion on the disease's contested identity, he was being summoned to return to Paris.The summons was, in part, a sign that Paris was finally giving Nicolle the acclaim he had long sought.Yet, the call came not from the Maison mère, but from the Collège de France. Moreover, the Collège wanted him for the Chair of Experimental Medicine. The position, established a century earlier by François Magendie, had been made still more famous by his student and successor, Claude Bernard, and had continued to be the province of physiology, not bacteriology, right up until 1931. In other words, just as he was attempting to determine the nature of experimentation in microbiology, and the extent to which the laboratory spoke to nature, Nicolle was placing himself in a position to challenge the institutional definition of “experimental medicine” in France. All evidence suggests that he was far more interested in challenging the direction of the IP in Paris. By the end of 1933, he would be well positioned to make that challenge.

The Chair of Experimental Medicine

Nicolle knew he was being considered for the Chair of Experimental Medicine at the Collège de France even before he left for his 1931 mission. Only after his return from Mexico that August, however, did he give the matter serious consideration. Although he was well aware of the position's prestige and had been assured that he “would only have to present myself to be appointed,” he still hesitated, and turned to Duhamel for advice. Marcelle was now settled in Tunis; he was far from finished with his work there. Moreover, he had become quite attached to his adopted home: if he were to take the position, “Would I have to leave Africa?” Duhamel responded emphatically: “no hesitation is possible. You must accept… . I repeat: you must accept.”