Nicolle, Charles Jules Henri (1866-1936), a French bacteriologist, won the 1928 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work on the disease of typhus.
In 1909, Nicolle discovered that typhus fever is transmitted by the body louse. He went on to attempt to develop vaccines against typhus and other diseases, including murine typhus, which is transmitted by the rat flea. See Typhus .
Nicolle was born in Rouen, France. He studied at the local medical school for three years and then at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he wrote his thesis on the soft chancre (an ulcer associated with syphilis). In 1902, he became director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, in Tunisia.
