Laveran, Charles Louis Alphonse (1845-1922)

French physician who discovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan, the first time that protozoa were shown to be a cause of disease. For this work and later discoveries of protozoan diseases he was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Laveran was born in Paris and studied in Strasbourg. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out he became an army surgeon, and in 1874 he was appointed professor of military medicine at the Ecole du Val-de-Grâce. Between 1878 and 1883 he was posted to Algeria. He left the army 1896 to join the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and in 1907 he used the money from his Nobel prize to open the Laboratory of Tropical Diseases at the institute. In 1880, Laveran examined blood samples from malarial patients and discovered amoebalike organisms growing within red blood cells. They divided and formed spores, which invaded unaffected blood cells. He noted that the spores were released in each affected red cell at the same time and corresponded with a fresh attack of fever in the patient. Laveran's studies of protozoan diseases included leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis. His publications included Traité des maladies et épidemies des armées/Treatise on Army Sicknesses and Epidemics 1875 and Trypanosomes et trypanosomiasis 1904.