Ernest Conseil (1879 - 1930)

Ernest Conseil was born in Charleval on September 10, 1879. He did a large part of his studies in Rouen: first at Corneille High School, then he began medical studies there, which gave him the opportunity to meet Charles Nicolle for the first time in 1901, then head of department at the Hospice Général and head of the bacteriology laboratory attached to the Rouen Medical School. Ernest Conseil then left for the Sadiki Hospital in Tunis, reserved for the natives, to complete his internship. It is there that he will be confronted with his first epidemic of typhus, a serious infectious disease known since antiquity, to which he decides to devote his doctoral thesis. Within this hospital, he runs a small laboratory where he does his first research in collaboration with Charles Nicolle, director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis since January 1903. The latter will recount: "During these tests, Conseil was contaminated by the prick of a finger. He contracted osteomyelitis which put his life in danger, tortured him for weeks, made him, treacherously, a slave to narcotics and left him crippled by an arm. »

However, he continued his work and thanks to Charles Nicolle, he became in 1909 director of the newly created Municipal Hygiene Office of Tunis and head doctor of the Rabta lazaret for the contagious. It was during a new typhus epidemic raging in Tunisia that Charles Nicolle, Ernest Conseil and Charles Comte, discovered and experimentally demonstrated the role of lice in the transmission of the disease, which earned Charles Nicolle the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1928. In the course of this work, Ernest Conseil contracted the disease and his life was once again in danger.

During the Great War, in April 1915, he joined the French medical mission in Serbia. Assigned to the hospital of Valievo, he was soon confronted with another serious typhus epidemic. Then, at the end of 1915, in the face of the Austrian and Bulgarian pressure, he was forced to take a month-long retreat march in appalling conditions through the snowy mountains of Montenegro. Suffering from frostbite on his feet, he had to have several toes amputated.

On his return to Tunis in 1916, he continued his work and collaboration with Charles Nicolle, sometimes his health problems wouldn’t let him work. At the end of 1929, he was to make a name for himself again in the epidemic of pulmonary plague that threatened Tunis. Exhausted, he died in Tunis on June 5, 1930. In the words of Charles Nicolle, "Honors came to him after death. ». , it was in August 1930 that he was cited to the Order of the Nation. And in 1934, a monument was erected in his memory at the entrance to the Rabta hospital to which his name was given.