Born in 1866, in Rouen, France, Charles Jules Henri Nicolle was the son of physician Eugène Nicolle. Charles took his medical degree in 1893 in Paris, then returned to Rouen for a staff position in a hospital. Shortly thereafter, he married Alice Avice. Nicolle agreed in 1902 to assume the directorship of the Institute Pasteur in Tunis, Tunisia. Until his death in 1936, Nicolle lived and worked in Tunis with occasional lecturing in Paris.

Affiliated with the original Institute Pasteur (which was founded in Paris in 1888), the institute in Tunis was basically an organization in name only. Over the years to come, however, Nicolle improved a run-down antirabies vaccination unit into a leading center for the study of North African and tropical diseases. It was in Tunis where Nicolle accomplished his groundbreaking work on typhus. He became intrigued by the observation that an outbreak of typhus did not seem to...