The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.
— Charles Jules Henry Nicole
My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.
It did not seem likely that I was destined to undertake research on typhus.
I demonstrated the characteristics of experimental fever. It appears after an incubation period which is never less than five days. It follows the same pattern as natural fever in man, but is of shorter duration and less pronounced.
At the time when I was conducting my research there was no known method for taking the guinea pig's temperature. I demonstrated a technique which is now widely used.
The discovery that I soon made that the guinea pig was also susceptible to infection made it possible for me, from the third year on, to preserve the virus on this animal.
Most of the doctors in the Tunisian administration, especially those in country districts, contracted typhus and approximately one third of them died of it.
I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals.
From the practical point of view, the susceptibility to infection of the guinea pig proved to be the most useful step forward. Today, all laboratories use this animal for preserving the virus.
Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.
Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection.
I finally demonstrated that typhus infection is not hereditary in the louse.
Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated.
