The implementation of Nicolle's 1909 Report on typhus in Serbia

Research indicate that the scientific community and the general public, not only in Serbia, were unfamiliar with the original presentation by French microbiologist Charles Nicolle and the content of the paper on the transmission of typhus via body lice published in the Report of the French Academy of Sciences in September 1909. For this discovery and the recommendations, he provided for suppressing the epidemic, Nicolle received the Nobel Prize, however, this alone was not enough to resolve the immediate problem of controlling the wartime typhus epidemic in Serbia between 1914-1915, which was accompanied by heavy losses. Regardless, these hypothetical factors were a prerequisite for its successful supression. This fact is of crucial importance for examining the medical aspect of the history of the Great War in Serbia and reconstructing the epidemic. It was of great interest for the global and national history of medicine due to pioneering preventive medical initiatives in which the views and conclusions of Nicolle were applied and validated. In the typhus outbreaks that followed, owing to the contributions made to medical science in Serbia, a recurrence of suffering on the scale seen prior to 1915 was not to be expected.