Félix Mesnil

Who was Félix Mesnil?

Félix Étienne Pierre Mesnil was a French zoologist, biologist, botanist, mycologist and algologist.

He worked in Pasteur Institute from 1892 first as an add-coach after being a student of Alfred Giard and a classmate of Maurice Caullery and was secretary of Louis Pasteur and at the same time, he began studies on compared cellular immunity, physiology and pathology in the laboratory of Ilya Ilyich Metchnikov.

He founded the Pasteur Institute Bulletin with Gabriel Bertrand, Alexandre Besredka, Amédée Borrel, Camille Delezenne and Auguste-Charles Marie.

Member of the French Commission on sleeping sickness, he worked for the organisation of the mission in French Equatorial Africa.

He also worked for the creation of the Société de pathologie exotique for which he became secretary, then president.

In 1903, together with Alphonse Laveran, he showed that the parasite responsible for the visceral leishmaniasis, first described by William Boog Leishman, is a new protozoa, different from Trypanosoma, the agent of the sleeping sickness, and from Plasmodium, the agent of paludism. He temporarily named it P. donovani and Sir Ronald Ross proposed the Leishmania genus name for it.