Alexandre Yersin
|
|
Alexandre_Yersin.jpg
Alexandre Yersin
Alexandre Emile John Yersin (September 22, 1863 - March 1, 1943) was a Swiss physician and bacteriologist. One owes to him the discovery of the bacillus of the bubonic plague or pest, which was renamed in his honour (Yersinia pestis).
Yersin was born in 1863 in Lavaux, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland. From 1883 to 1884, Yersin studied medicine at Lausanne, Switzerland; and then at Marburg, Germany and Paris, France (1884-1886). In 1886, he entered Louis Pasteur's research laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure, by invitation of Emile Roux, and participated in the development in the anti-rabies serum. In 1888 he received his doctoral dissertation with a thesis on Étude sur le Développement du Tubercule Expérimental and spent two months with Robert Koch in Germany. He joined the recently created Pasteur Institute in 1889 as Roux's collborator, and discovered with him the diphtheric toxin (produced by the Corynebacterium diphtheriae bacillus).
In order to practice medicine in France, Yersin applied to and obtained the French nationality in 1888. Soon afterwards (1890), he left for French Indochina in Southeast Asia as a physician to the Messageries Maritimes company, in the Saigon-Manila line and then in the Saigon-Haiphong line. In 1894 Yersin was sent by request of the French government and the Pasteur Institute to Hong-Kong, to investigate an outbreak of pest, and there he makes his greatest discovery, that of the pathogen which causes the disease. He was also able to demonstrate for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible mean of transmission. The important discovery is communicated to the French Academy of Sciences in the same year, by his colleague Emil Duclaux, in a classic paper titled La Peste Bubonique de Hong-Kong.
From 1895 to 1897, Yersin pursued further his studies on the bubonic plague. In 1895 he returned to the Institute Pasteur in Paris and with Émile Roux, Albert Calmette and Armand Borrel, prepared the first antipest serum. In the same year, he returned to Indochina, where he installed a small laboratory at Nha Trang, in order to manufacture the serum (in 1905 this laboratory was to become a branch of the Pasteur Institute). Yersin tried the serum received from Paris in Canton and Amoy, in 1896, and in Bombay, India, in 1897, with disappoint results. Decided to stay in his new country of adoption, he participated actively in the creation of the Medical School of Hanoi in 1902, and was its first director, until 1904.
Yersin also had his hand in agriculture, and was a pioneer in the culture of rubber trees imported from Brazil (Hevea brasiliensis) into Indochina. For this purpose, he obtained in 1897 a concession from the government to establish an agricultural station at Suoi Dau. He also opened a new station at Hon Ba in 1915, where he tried to acclimatize in that country the quinine tree (Cinchona ledgeriana), which was imported from the Andes in South America by the Spaniards and which produced the first known effective remedy for preventing and treating malaria (a disease which is very much prevalent in Southest Asia to this day).
Alexandre Yersin left strong remembrances in Vietnam, where he was affectionely called Ông Năm (Mr. Nam/Fifth) by the people. Not only the streets which were named in his honor were not changed with the country&'s independence, but his tomb in Suoi Dau is accompanied by a pagoda where rites are performed in his worship. Yersin's house in Nha Trang is now a very complete museum, and the epitaph at his tombstone describes him as a "Benefactor and humanist, venerated by the Vietnamese people". At Hanoi, a French Lycée has his name.
In 1934 he was nominated a honorary director of Pasteur Institute and a member of its Board of Administration. He died during World War II at his home in Nha Trang, in 1943.
Quotation
"You ask me if I appreciate medical practice. Yes and no. I have a lot of pleasure in taking care of those who come to ask my advice, but I would not like to make medicine a trade, in other words, I could never ask a patient to pay me for care that I can given him. I regard medicine as a priesthood, as much as a pastoral one. To require money in exchange of providing care to a patient, amounts to me as the same as demanding from him his money or his life "
External link
- Alexandre Yersin and his adventures in Vietnam (http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/millhillessays/2003/yersin/)
- Alexandre Yersin (http://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/archives/yer0.html). Répéres Chronologiques. Institut Pasteur, Paris (In French).de:Alexandre Émile Jean Yersin