Edmond Nocard

Who was Edmond Nocard?

Edmond Isidore Etienne Nocard, was a French veterinarian and microbiologist, born in Provins.

Nocard studied veterinary medicine from 1868 to 1871 and from 1871 to 1873 in the École Vétérinaire de Maisons-Alfort. From 1873 to 1878 he was hired as Head of Clinical Service at the same school, working with Dumesnil. In 1876 he is charged with the creation of a new journal, the Archives Vétérinaires. In this journal, Nocard will publish a great number of scientific papers, on medicine, surgery, hygiene and jurisprudence. In 1878 he is approved in a public contest as Professor of Clinical and Surgical Veterinary of the École Veterinaire. Among his many pupils who became famous, was Camille Guérin, co-discoverer of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin.

In 1880 Nocard entered the laboratory of Louis Pasteur in Paris as an assistant. There, he helped Pasteur and Emile Roux in their classic experiments of vaccination of animals against anthrax at Pouilly-le-Fort. In 1883, he traveled to Egypt with Roux, Straus and Thuiller, in order to study an outbreak of cholera there, but they were unable to isolate the germ responsible for the disease.