Charles Nicolle

Charles Jules Henri Nicolle was born on 21 September 1866 in France and trained as a bacteriologist at a time when infectious disease still baffled medicine. His work zeroed in on epidemic typhus, the fever that had torn through wars and crowded quarters for centuries without a clear vector. He identified lice as the transmitter - a finding that gave physicians their first real grip on containment. The discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Nicolle died on 28 February 1936, seventy years old, having handed the world a map to one of its oldest plagues.