He learned about biology early from his father Eugène Nicolle, a Doctor at a Rouen hospital. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. He received his M.D. in 1893 from the Pasteur Institute. At this point he returned to Rouen, as a member of the Medical Faculty until 1896 and then as Director of the Bacteriological Laboratory.
He married Alice Avice in 1895, and had two children, Marcelle (b. 1896) and Pierre (b. 1898).
In 1903 Nicolle became Director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, where he did his Nobel Prize-winning work on typhus, bringing Hélène Sparrow with him as laboratory chief. He was still Director of the Institute when he died in 1936. He was a key researcher in discovering a deadly organism, Toxoplasma.
In June 1909 Nicolle tested his theory by infecting a chimpanzee with typhus, retrieving the lice from it, and placing it on a healthy chimpanzee. Within 10 days the second chimpanzee had typhus as well. After repeating his experiment he was sure of it: lice were the carriers.
He did not succeed in his effort to develop a practical vaccine. The next step would be taken by Rudolf Weigl in 1930.
