Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran

He died on May 18, 1922, after suffering for several months from an undefined illness. He was buried in Paris in the ‘Cimetière du Montparnasse’.

He was born on June 18, 1845, at Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, France to Dr. Louis Théodore Laveran and Marie-Louise Anselme Guénard de la Tour Laveran as their only son among two children.

His father was an army doctor and his mother was from a family of high-ranking army officers, thus a military environment prevailed around him since childhood.

Due to his father’s service, his family moved to Algeria when he was five. They returned to Paris in 1856 when his father joined the military medical school of Paris, ‘Ecole de Val-de-Grâce’, as a Professor and eventually became director, holding the position of Army Medical Inspector.

He completed his higher education from two private schools, first attending ‘Collège Saint Barbe’ and thereafter ‘Lycée Louis-le-Grand’.

Laveran wished to follow his father’s footsteps into medicine and in this pursuit he applied and got enrolled at the Public Health School at Strasbourg in 1863. He was inducted as a resident medical student in the Strasbourg civil hospital in 1866 and in 1867 earned his medical degree from the ‘University of Strasbourg’ by submitting a thesis on the regeneration of nerves.

Initially he was inducted in the French Army as a physician. Eventually he became a Medical Assistant-Major by which time the 1870 Franco-Prussian War broke out.

He witnessed several major battles as an ambulance officer including the devastating siege of Metz, where he was posted. He also faced brief incarceration by the Germans.

When the French were defeated and eventually surrendered Metz, which was occupied by the Germans, he relocated to hospitals at Lille. Thereafter he moved to Paris and served at the ‘St Martin Hospital’ (at present ‘St Martin's House’).

He qualified in a competitive exam surpassing other physicians in 1874 and was thereby inducted for a term till 1878 to the ‘Chair of Military Diseases and Epidemics’ at the ‘École de Val-de-Grâce’, a post that his father held at some point of time.

Thereafter he was sent to Algeria where he worked in military hospitals till 1883 in the cities of Bône and Constantine (Qusantînah) respectively. While serving in military hospitals of the two cities he came across wards full of malaria patients. French military recruits were also getting into the clutches of this potentially fatal tropical disease.

Laveran discovered that a protozoan was the causative organism responsible for malaria, thus citing for the first time that protozoa were the cause of any disease. Thus this discovery was a confirmation of the germ theory of diseases.