TAMING THE SERPENT … AND THE BUBONIC PLAGUE … AND TUBERCULOSIS: On this day in 1863, Albert Calmette—one of the history’s most prolific medical researchers—was born in Nice, France.

In 1891, Calmette established a branch of the Pasteur Institute in (then) French Indochina. There he studied cobra venom and other poisons. Back in France, he developed the first successful snake antivenom using serum derived from the blood of immunized horses.

Still a young man, Calmette went on to work with the Swiss-French physician Alexandre Yersin in developing a vaccine for the bubonic plague.  He traveled to Portugal to help study and fight an outbreak there in 1899.

His greatest contribution to medical science was his work on tuberculosis. The vaccine he helped develop—the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin or BCG vaccine—is not perfect (nothing ever is). But it is still used in many countries where tuberculosis is a serious threat and has saved many lives.   Weirdly, there is evidence that it helps prevent COVID 19 too.

I’m told that few things in the former French Indochina—now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—have retained French names. But there is still a Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh and a Calmette Street in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Pasteur and Yersin have streets there too.  Long may it be so.