Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
(18 June 1845 – 18 May 1922) was a French physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his discoveries of parasitic protozoans as causative agents of infectious diseases such as malaria andtrypanosomiasis. Following his father, Louis Théodore Laveran, he took up military medicine as profession. He obtained his medical degree from University of Strasbourg in 1867.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he joined the French Army. At the age of 29 he became Chair of Military Diseases and Epidemics at the École de Val-de-Grâce. At the end of his tenure in 1878 he worked in Algeria, where he made his major achievements. He discovered that the protozoan parasite (Plasmodium) was responsible for malaria, and that Trypanosomacaused trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness. In 1894 he returned to France to serve in various military health services. In 1896 he joined Pasteur Institute as Chief of the Honorary Service, from where he received the Noble Prize. He donated half of his Nobel money to establish Laboratory of Tropical Medicine at the Pasteur Institute. In 1908 he founded the Société de Pathologie Exotique.
Laveran was elected to French Academy of Sciences in 1893, and was conferred Commander of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1912.
In 1880, while working in the military hospital in Constantine, Algeria, he discovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan, after observing the parasites in a blood smear taken from a patient who had just died of malaria. He found the causative organism to be a protozoan which he named Oscillaria malariae, but later renamed Plasmodium. This was the first time that protozoans were shown to be a cause of disease of any kind. The discovery was therefore a validation of the germ theory of diseases.
Laveran later worked on the trypanosomes, particularly sleeping sickness, and showed once again that protozoans were responsible for the disease.
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