Waldemar Haffkine

HAFFKINE, Vladimir Mordochai (1860-1930), a well-known bacteriologist, originally from Odessa. He graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Novorossiysk University in 1883. From 1883 to 1888, he worked at the Odessa Zoological Museum, then went to Switzerland and in 1888-1889 lectured as a privatdozent at the University of Geneva. From 1889 to 1893, he was an assistant at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. When the British government approached this institute in 1893 with a request to send someone to study cholera epidemics in India, the Pasteur Institute sent Haffkine there. From that moment on, Haffkine's entire subsequent life and work took place in British service. From 1893 to 1902, Haffkine worked in a bacteriological laboratory in Bombay, producing a cholera vaccine and widely distributing it in India. In 1896, the Indian government invited Haffkine to study the question of vaccination against plague. In 1900, he produced a plague vaccine and its mass application began. Later, Haffkine was appointed director of the bacteriological laboratory in Calcutta, where he remained until 1915, after which he moved to permanent residence in Paris. In 1915, during the war, Haffkine proposed and applied on a large scale in the British army a combined vaccine against typhoid and paratyphoid fevers. Haffkine's scientific contribution lies not in any theoretical scientific discoveries, but in the practical application of bacteriological methods to the treatment of epidemic diseases, mainly cholera and plague. Vaccines manufactured according to his principle against these diseases are still widely used in India and Indochina. When Haffkine began studying cholera inoculations, he faced the problem of producing a vaccine of constant potency, as well as preparing cholera cultures possessing extremely high virulence. He succeeded in solving these problems, and therefore the vaccines he produced gained such widespread practical application. Haffkine was a member of a number of scientific and medical societies. In 1925, the government of India named the bacteriological laboratory in Bombay the Haffkine Institute. Haffkine had no major scientific works, but he wrote a large number of articles on microbiology, cholera, plague, typhoid fever, and pneumonia in Russian medical journals (until 1890), and then mainly in French and English bacteriological journals. In the last years of his life, Haffkine devoted himself entirely to the Zionist movement and petty-bourgeois Jewish nationalism, wrote a number of articles on this subject, and took part in various Jewish nationalist organizations.