Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran

French physician and parasitologist (1845–1922)

The son of a military surgeon, Lavaran was born in Paris and studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg, obtaining his MD in 1867. Like his father, he joined the Army Medical Service and served in Algeria (1878–83).

In 1880 Laveran made one of the most important discoveries of 19th-century medicine, namely, the causative agent of malaria. In Algeria he frequently performed autopsies on malaria victims who, he noted, had numerous pigmented bodies in their blood. Although some of these bodies were in the red blood cells he also noted other free bodies, at the edge of which he observed moveable filaments or flagella. The extremely rapid and varied movements of these flagella indicated to Laveran that they must be parasites. He found such parasites in 148 out of 192 cases and thus assumed them to be the cause of malaria. He called the parasite Oscillaria malariae but the Italian name Plasmodium later won favor.

Laveran also speculated that mosquitoes might play a part in transmitting malaria but he failed to follow up this insight. In 1883 he returned to France to become professor of military hygiene and parasitology at the Val-de-Grace School of Military Medicine and in 1897 moved to the Pasteur Institute where he remained until his death. Here he published important works on leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis.

In 1884 Laveran published Traité des fièvres palustres (Treatise on marsh Fevers), which later won him the 1907 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for showing the role played by protozoa in causing disease. With the prize money he founded a laboratory of tropical medicine at the Pasteur Institute.

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.

(SEE ALSO: Malaria; Pathogenic Organisms)

Bibliography

Bruce-Chwatt, L. J. (1981). "Alphonse Laveran's Discovery 100 Years Ago and Today's Global Fight Against Malaria." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 74(7):531–536.

Garnham, P. C. C. (1998). "History of Discoveries of Malaria Parasites." In History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 10(1):93–108.

— JENNIFER KOSLOW

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Laveran, Charles Louis Alphonse (shärl lwē älfôNs' lävəräN') , 1845–1922, French physician. While an army surgeon in Algiers he discovered (1880) the parasite that causes malaria and wrote many treatises on the subject. He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on protozoa in the causation of disease.

(lăv'ə-räN', läv-räN'), Charles Louis Alphonse 1845–1922.

French pathologist. He won a 1907 Nobel Prize for investigating the role of protozoa in the generation of disease.

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