Léon Charles Albert Calmette, 1863-1933

• Published in: Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 1934
• Subjects: Calmette; Lister; Pasteur; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1934.0015; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1934.0015

Albert Calmette was born at Nice on July 12, 1863. His father was secretary to the prefecture. The Calmettes were of Breton origin. After passing his baccalauréat ès lettres at Rennes and his baccalauréat es sciences at Paris, Calmette entered the Naval Medical School at Brest in 1881. At this time the part played by microbes in infectious diseases had been demonstrated by Pasteur and Lister and was exciting wide interest. Koch had just discovered the bacillus of tuberculosis. The young Calmette was fascinated by these discoveries and the possibilities they indicated of understanding and ultimately controlling diseases. He became an enthusiastic Pastorian and devoted himself to his microscope. Whilst a cadet at the naval school he took part in the China Campaign of 1883-4. At Hong Kong he met Patrick Manson, who explained to him his observations on the life-history of the filaria parasite and showed him the proof he had obtained that the parasite was conveyed from person to person by a mosquito. This, the first evidence of the insect transmission of a disease made a great impression on Calmette and he chose the subject of filariasis for the thesis he presented for his doctor’s degree three years later. In 1885, Calmette returned to France to complete his medical studies. He graduated in July, 1886, at the University of Paris. Shortly afterwards, he went to the French Congo. During his two years of service as a naval surgeon on the coast of West Africa he studied tropical diseases and published descriptive articles on sleeping sickness and black-water fever in the Archives de Medicine Navale. In 1888, he was sent to the French Islands of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland,, where he had medical charge of six thousand sailors and fishermen. It was at St. Pierre that he made his first contribution to bacteriology. The local industry was the capture and salting of cod for export to< France. For some mysterious reason, the salted cod frequently developed red spots known in the trade as maladie ...