Paul-Louis+Simond

 **Paul-Louis Simond** (July 30, 1858 – March 3, 1947):

 Born in Beaufort-sur-Gervanne, Simond w as a French physician, best known for his discovery and ability to demonstrate that the intermediates in the transmission of the bubonic plague were fleas. //Xenopsylla cheopis// were the fleas that fed off the blood of infected rats and effectively transmitted the disease via the human blood stream. Simond was an assistant in Medical and Biological Sciences at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bordeaux from 1878 to 1882, and he eventually began training for his medical career there as well. After contracting a less-virile strain of yellow fever while serving as director of a leprosarium near Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, Simond returned to Bordeaux in 1886. He would soon begin receiving honours for his work in medicine, as he attained his medical doctorate with a prize-winning thesis on leprosy in 1887. Eight years later, he began work at the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he would become the first to provide a comprehensively detailed description of the sexual reproductive processes of Coccidia. After Alexandre Yersin was transferred by the Pasteur Institute to a post in Vietnam in 1897, Simon quickly overtook Yersin's old position in Bombay; he who sought to test the effectiveness and possibly side-effects of an experimental antiserum ag ainst the outbreak of plague that was happening in Indochina. The following year, Simond was in Karachi where, despite being without adequate resources for an extensive medical lab, he was able to prove that fleas transmit the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the agent which causes the bubonic plague, from rat to rat, and from rat to human. His carefully thought out experiments are described in personal reports to the Pasteur Institute on the spread of plague; these experiments were shared with the public, as they were published in 1898, in the //Annales de l'Institut Pasteur//. For his incredibly detailed and executed work, Simond won the Barbier prize from the French Academy of Medicine. Although some of his findings were not widely accepted by the entire scientific community at first, as his experiments were quite complicated and difficult to comprehend upon first glance, they were eventually validated effectively by others. It was finally in 1907 that Simond had his conclusions widely accepted as scientific fact. [1]

[1] "Paul-Louis Simond and His Discovery of Plague Transmission by Rat Fleas: a Centenary. - UKPMC Article." // UK PubMed Central //. Web. 8 Apr. 2011. .