Joseph Rollet

Vocation

Notable

French physician, venerologist and surgeon, whose 900-page book, Traité des maladies vénériennes (Treatise of venereal diseases) was published in 1865. He was the first to assert the difference between chancroid and indurated syphilitic chancre (syphilis), thus contradicting the theories of Philippe Ricord, who saw in these lesions the same malady. In 1856 he was able to demonstrate experimentally the validity of these observations. In 1859 he published that the incubation of syphilis was about three weeks, which Ricord denied. Rollet's rigorous observations made it possible to assert the contagiousness of syphilis and the beginning of the disease by a chancre: he proved that the transmission of syphilis could take place via a chancre on the nipple of a nurse infected by a sick infant. His discoveries had therapeutic and medico-legal consequences of great importance. He died on 2 August 1894, aged 69, in Lyon. Link to Wikipedia biography (French)