Eugene Jamot

Eugène Jamot (14 November 1879 – 24 April 1937) was a French military doctor in the colonial troops who played a major role in the prevention of sleeping sickness in Cameroon and other central African countries.

Jamot trained as a medical doctor at the University of Montpellier. In 1909, he enrolled at the Marseille School of Tropical Medicine and a year later, in 1910 he went to Cameroon with a French colonial hygiene group. They joined German scientists who had organised a Sleeping Sickness Treatment Research Group. Jamot discovered that the tsetse fly was the vector of the trypanosomes causing the disorder. By sending multiple public health intervention teams in villages, Jamot's team considerably reduced the incidence of trypanosomiasis, and thus, its transmission, in Cameroon and hence the disease.

Later Jamot was made director of the Pasteur Institute at Brazzaville.

Early life and training Eugène Léon Clovis Jamot was born on 14 November 1879 in La Borie, a hamlet in the commune of Saint-Sulpice-les-Champs, from a modest peasant family. He did his secondary studies at the Collège d' Aubusson, a brilliant student but rowdy and undisciplined, he behaved like a "gang leader" according to his teachers.

He passed his baccalaureate in Clermont in 1898 and enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences of Poitiers where he obtained his license in 1900. To obey the wishes of his father who wanted him to become a teacher, he left for Algeria in 1902 to occupy positions of "repetiteur" (term of the time to designate an assistant professor). His medical vocation was born in Algiers where he enrolled to obtain his Certificat d'études physiques, chimiques et biologiques (certificate of physical, chemical and natural studies, known as PCN)

Late life He died on 24 April 1937, in the village of Sardent, Creuse.