Waldemar Haffkine

Who was Waldemar Haffkine?

Waldemar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine, CIE was a Russian Empire Jewish bacteriologist, whose career was blighted in Russia because "he refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy." He emigrated and worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed an anti-cholera vaccine that he tried out successfully in India. He is recognized as the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. He tested the vaccines on himself. Lord Joseph Lister named him "a saviour of humanity".

He was knighted in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year Honours in 1897. The Jewish Chronicle of that time noted "a Russian Jew, trained in the schools of European science, saves the lives of helpless Hindoos and Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great".