Yersina pestis: Discovery of transmission

The French scientist Paul-Louis Simond (1858–1947) – member of the famous Pasteur Institute at Paris (France) – came into contact with the plague disease, which had threatened and killed as Black Death during several centuries millions of humans, 3 years after Yersin and Kitasato had discovered the plague bacillus in 1894 – both working simultaneously in Hong Kong (Yersin 1894; Kitasato 1894; Simond et al. 1998; Grüntzig and Mehlhorn 2010a, b). He had been sent to Bombay (India) as successor of Yersin in order to bring an experimental serum into use that had been developed by Yersin at the Pasteur Institute. As this time, the transmission pathway of plague was under intense discussion in the German, English, Russian, Italian, and French scientific communities, and the idea of an activity of arthropods as vectors of pathogens was in its “children’s shoes” or even not yet born. Simond, as an active physician, noted that at the beginning of a plague infection, small blisters occurred on...