Home > Encyclopedia of Public Health > Laveran, Alphonse

Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran was born in 1845 in Paris, France, where he also died in 1922. Laveran's father was a distinguished physician in the French military, and Laveran continued the family tradition. He enrolled in l'École du Service de Santé Militaire at Strasbourg in 1863 and served during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1874 he received the post of Professor Agregé des Maladies et Epidemies des Armées. In 1878, Laveran was sent to work in an Algerian hospital outside the city of Constantine. A number of troops had fallen victim to malaria and Laveran began conducting postmortem examinations. Physicians had been familiar with this disease, which is characterized by fever, since ancient times, but its etiology and process of transmission were still unknown. Laveran's initial findings—that the internal organs were discolored—confirmed previous research experiments. When he began to examine blood from the organs, however, he noticed something new. He observed a series of filaments, or parasites, moving independently among the red blood cells.

Laveran presented his discovery at a meeting at the Académie de Médecine in Paris a few weeks later on November 23, 1880. During the next year, Laveran recorded parasites in 148 out of 200 patients believed to have died from malaria. Yet, when Laveran demonstrated his experiment in Italy, a center for the study of malaria, skeptics questioned his deduction that the filaments were independent living organisms. Although he had discovered the parasite that causes malaria, now known as Plasmodium, the relationship between the parasite and outbreaks of the disease remained elusive. Laveran returned to Paris in 1884 and published Traité des Fièvres Palustres. He continued his studies as a professor of military hygiene at Valde-Grace Hospital and, after his retirement from the army, at the Pasteur Institute. By the time of his death, Laveran had published approximately six hundred works on the subject of parasites in man and animals and received a Nobel Prize for his work.

JENNIFER KOSLOW

(SEE ALSO: Malaria; Pathogenic Organisms)