Paul-Louis Simond (July 30, 1858 - 1947) was a French bacteriologist who was born in Beaufort-sur-Gervanne.
From 1882 to 1886 he served as director of a leprosarium near Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, Guyane. In 1887 he received his medical doctorate at Bordeaux with a prize-winning thesis on leprosy. In 1895 he began work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
In 1896-97 while working in the laboratory of Elie Metchnikoff, he was the first to provide a comprehensive description of the sexual reproductive processes of Coccidia.
In 1897-98, while testing an anti-serum for bubonic plague in southern Asia (India, Karachi), he determined that the plague was a disease of rats that was spread by Xenopsylla cheopis to humans. A few years earlier (1894), Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943), also of the Pasteur Institute, had identified the plague bacillus as yersinia pestis.
From 1898 to 1901 he served as director of the Pasteur Institute in Saigon. From 1901 to 1905 he participated on a mission to study yellow fever in Brazil, and in 1908-09 he conducted yellow fever research in Martinique. From 1911 to 1913 he served as director of the Institute of Bacteriology in Constantinople.
Simond had a keen interest in botany; during his stay as a colonial doctor in Indochina from 1914 until 1917, he collected orchids and had a local artist create watercolor paintings of them. He amassed a collection of 226 watercolor paintings of orchids which were presented to the Phanerogamie of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in 1947.
References
- [1] Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine; Plague Transmission by Fleas
- Portail Institut Pasteur (chronological biography)
- Find health articles (Paul-Louis Simond et les coccidies)
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