Nicolle, Charles Jules Henri (1866-1936).

French bacteriologist whose discovery in 1909 that typhus is transmitted by the body louse made the armies of World War I introduce delousing as a compulsory part of the military routine. Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 1928. His original observation was that typhus victims, once admitted to hospitals, did not infect the staff; he speculated that transmission must be via the skin or clothes, which were washed as standard procedure for new admissions. The experimental evidence was provided by infecting a healthy monkey using a louse recently fed on an infected chimpanzee. Nicolle was born in Rouen and studied in Paris. He became director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis 1902. From 1932 he was professor at the Collège de France. He was also a novelist.