Paul Louis Simond

PaulLouis Simond was a French physician, chief medical officer and biologist whose major contribution to science was his demonstration that the intermediates in the transmission of bubonic plague from rats to humans are the fleas Xenopsylla cheopis that dwell on infected rats.

PaulLouis Simond was born in BeaufortsurGervanne, onJuly 1858. His father was a pastor of the Reformed Church. From 1878 to 1882 Simond was an assistant in Medical and Biological Sciences at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bordeaux, and he began his medical training there. From 1882 to 1886 he served as director of a leprosarium near SaintLaurentduMaroni, French Guyana, where he contracted an attenuated form of yellow fever. He returned to Bordeaux in 1886 and the following year he received his medical doctorate with a prizewinning thesis on leprosy.

Source: Wikipedia