5 - Invisible Forces: or, Action at a Distance

Summary

To the reader who would reproach us for indulging our fragile speculations in the pages of this journal, we would reply that we have some excuse. In the great laboratories of Europe and America, no one would begrudge a “veteran” the exposition, in conversation, of tentative or impromptu explanations that were suggested to him by new observations. … Nothing remains of such words but the seeds that they may, by chance, disperse.

Far from the common hearths [foyers] of our science, reduced to an elite but circumscribed audience, we have rashly written what elsewhere we might have spoken without controversy.

—Nicolle, “Sur la Nature des Virus Invisibles,” 1925

From the war years on, Nicolle enjoyed a steady stream of scientific visitors to his colonial institute. Members of the parasitology lab of the Faculté de Médecine de Paris—one of his favored providers of new collaborators—frequently came to Tunis to conduct research. In 1923, he welcomed Dr. Salvadore Mazza, Professor of Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine of Buenos Aires; two years later, Mazza played gracious host to Nicolle during his mission to Argentina. Yet another of Nicolle's frequent visitors was John Reenstierna. A professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Stockholm, Reenstierna initially came to the IPT in late 1922 as part of a mission for the Swedish government. He returned the following summer and again in 1926: the year he paid tribute to Nicolle at the Journées Médicales. Apparently, Reenstierna's public praise was backed up with private activism. It can hardly be a coincidence that Nicolle first found himself in the running for a Nobel Prize in the autumn of 1923. He wrote to Vallery-Radot:

Now, I must confess something extraordinary to you (and to you alone). I have been proposed quite seriously for the Swedish prize. Receiving it would give me greater freedom and an easier role to play, because I could return to the Parisian institute without taking anyone's place and act as a moral agent: something I find difficult from my corner of Africa.

Though the 1923 run for the Nobel was to prove unsuccessful, Reenstierna's efforts on Nicolle's behalf offer a striking example of the kinds of networks that the director-isolé managed to create between his Tunisian institute and the rest of the medico-scientific world.