Albert Calmette

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Albert Calmette

Léon Charles Albert Calmette (born July 12, 1863 in Nice , † October 29, 1933 in Paris ) was a French doctor , bacteriologist and immunologist . He discovered the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin , a vaccine against tuberculosis, and developed the Calmette - serum against the effects of snake bites.

Life

Calmette wanted to be a doctor and a seafarer. From 1881 he attended the school for ship doctors in Brest . He studied medicine in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris. From 1883 he served as a military doctor in the French Navy. He took part in the war with China . In Hong Kong he gained knowledge about malaria , about which he wrote his doctoral thesis in 1886. He later served in West Africa in Gabon and the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon archipelago and in French Congo , where he studied malaria, African trypanosomiasis and pellagra .

On his return to France in 1890, he met Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux , whose collaborators he became. Pasteur commissioned him to set up a branch of the Louis Pasteur Institute in Saigon in 1891 .

There he discovered toxicology as a field of research and activity. He examined the effects of snake and bee poisons as well as plant poisons.

In 1894 he returned to France. He developed the Calmette serum against the effects of snake bites. He also worked on the development of a serum against the plague . In Portugal he helped fight a plague epidemic in Porto .

In 1895 he was entrusted with the management of the institute in Lille. In 1909 he set up another branch in Algiers . In 1904 he founded the " Ligue du Nord contre la Tuberculose " in Lille, which still exists today.

From 1918 he was director at the institute in Paris.

Calmette went down in medical history mainly for his fight against tuberculosis. Together with Camille Guérin, he not only developed an effective vaccine, but also a vaccination program against the disease that was fatal for the masses affected at the time.

The vaccination program suffered a setback in 1930 on the occasion of the scandal known as the Lübeck vaccination misfortune, in which 72 children died because of faulty sera at the institute. Mass vaccination of children was resumed in many countries in 1932, but Calmette had been badly hit by the scandal. He died in Paris a year later.

In 1921 he was elected to the Royal Society as a foreign member . In November 1927 he became a member of the Académie des sciences .

Albert Calmette was the brother of Gaston Calmette (1858-1914), the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro .

Memorial plaque on the house where he was born in Nice

literature

  • N. Bernard, L. Negre: Albert Calmette, sa vie, son oeuvre scientifique . Masson et Cie, Paris 1940.
  • LCA Calmette: The treatment of animals poisened with snake venom by the injection of anti-venomous serum. In: The Lancet. 1896, 2, pp. 449-450.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Köhler : Calmette, Albert Charles Léon. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 228.
  2. ↑ entry on Calmette; Léon Charles Albert (1863-1933) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter C. Académie des sciences, accessed on October 24, 2019 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Calmette, Albert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Calmette, Léon Charles Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French doctor, bacteriologist and immunologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice ,
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1933
Place of death Paris