Background
Joseph Pierre Martin Rollet was born on November 12, 1824, in Lagnieu, Ain, France.
1880
Portrait de J. Rollet par Chatigny
1892
Joseph Pierre Martin Rollet
University of Paris, Paris, France
After graduation from the lycée at Lyons, Rollet studied medicine in Paris.
physician scientist Surgeon Venereologist
Joseph Pierre Martin Rollet was born on November 12, 1824, in Lagnieu, Ain, France.
After graduation from the lycée at Lyons, Rollet studied medicine in Paris.
After graduation from the Medical Department of Paris University, Rollet became interne des hôpitaux in 1845, and worked on the surgical services of Beaujon Hospital under Stanislas Laugier, at St.-Antoine under Auguste Bérard, and at the Pitié under Jacques Lisfranc. In 1848 he published his doctoral thesis on traumatic hemorrhages in the skull and received a bronze medal for tending the victims of the June Days. Having failed in the competitive examination at Lyons for chief-of-service in surgery at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1849, Rollet won the competition at the Antiquaille Hospital, where patients with venereal disease predominated. The position was not available until 1855; he spent the waiting period in study and private practice. His research, teaching, and writing on syphilis during his nine years at the Antiquaille made him famous.
In French syphilography confusion reigned. The fashionable Paris professor Philippe Ricord, who dominated the field, taught that secondary syphilis is not contagious. Rollet soon showed that two diseases were being confused: “Rollet’s chancre” is a mixed infection consisting of what are now called Schaudinn’s bacillus (Treponema pallidum) and Ducrey’s bacillus (Haemophilus ducreyi). Rollet succeeded in differentiating between the two bacilli, in those days before the germ theory of disease was generally accepted, by painstaking clinical observation, establishing that syphilis has a mean incubation period of twenty-five days. He published his work in Recherches… sur la syphilis (1861) and Traité des maladies vénériennes (1865). He also contributed articles to Amédée Dechambre’s Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales.
Important practical and legal consequences derived from the fact that hereditary and secondary syphilis were recognized as contagious. Secondary syphilitic infection was widespread among glassblowers: three workers usually shared one blowing iron. Rollet identified this tool as the carrier of the “virus” and the glass industry soon mechanized the operation, substituting compressed air for human breath.
Wet nurses were blamed for infecting infants with syphilis. Rollet showed that the reverse often was the case: babies with congenital syphilis transmitted the infection through their mouths. He also cautioned that Jennerian vaccination often propagated syphilis and urged that animal serum be substituted for arm-to-arm vaccination. He summarized his work at the termination of his stewardship at the Antiquaille in Coup d’ oeil rétrospectif …(1864).
Appointed to membership, and soon the presidency, of the Conseil d’Hygiène et de Salubrité du Département du Rhône, Rollet became the delegate from Lyons to the International Congress of Medicine at Paris (1867), where he presented a report on general prophylactic measures against venereal disease. Congress empowered him to approach the French foreign ministry to explore possibilities for the international control of venereal disease, but the Franco-Prussian War permanently interrupted this work.
In 1877 Rollet was appointed professor of hygiene at the new Medical Faculty of Lyons.
He died at Lyons while presiding over a congress of the Society of Dermatology and Syphilography, which he had helped to found.
Rollet was a member of the Société Anatomique, the Société de Médecine Publique et d’Hygiène Professionnelle, an associate member of the Paris Academy of Medicine, and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. At the end of his life, he was also a member of the Society of Dermatology and Syphilography, which he had helped to found before his death.