1845-1922

French Physician, Military Surgeon and Parasitologist

Alphonse Laveran was a French surgeon who was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1907 for his discovery, and subsequent research, that disease could be spread by singlecell protozoa in the blood system. His continuing research following this breakthrough included diseases caused by other single-cell animals in the blood system.

Alphonse Laveran. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)

Laveran was born in Paris in 1845. The son of an army surgeon, he moved with his family to Algeria in 1850; the family returned to Paris in 1855. Laveran was a bright student who attended two well-known medical schools in the city of Strasbourg. In 1867 he graduated with an M.D.; his doctoral dissertation concerned the regeneration of damaged nerves. Soon after, with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, a war between Germany and France, Laveran followed his...