**The Government Office has issued a notification regarding the Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s agreement to confer the title of Honorary Citizen of Vietnam upon the scientist Alexandre Yersin. The announcement ceremony will be held on the evening of December 31, 2013.**
The information above was provided by Mr. Le Xuan Than – Vice Chairman of the People’s Committee of Khanh Hoa province – at a meeting with the Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism on the afternoon of September 30, 2013.
Alexandre Yersin was born on September 22, 1863, in Switzerland (he obtained French citizenship at the age of 24). He began studying medicine at the age of 20 and was an outstanding student of the renowned bacteriologists Pasteur and Koch. He collaborated with Dr. Roux to discover a cure for the plague.
At the age of just 26, Yersin’s reputation had already spread throughout the scientific community. He left Paris to travel to Indochina at the end of 1889. At that time, he worked as a physician for the Messageries Maritimes shipping company, and each time the ship docked in Nha Trang, he was fascinated by the majestic Truong Son mountain range. Driven by his adventurous spirit, he decided to walk from Nha Trang to Saigon. In July 1890, he rode a horse from Nha Trang to Phan Rí and then, with a guide, ventured into the deep forest, arriving in Di Linh two days later.
On June 21, 1893, Yersin discovered the Lang Biang plateau. At that time, the area was sparsely populated by a few villages of the Lat ethnic group. Yersin proposed to Governor Paul Doumer to establish a sanatorium and health resort here. In 1898, the construction of the city of Da Lat began… In 1894, Dr. Yersin led a team of 15 people to explore the provinces of Dak Lak and Kon Tum…
In 1895, after establishing the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang, he returned to France to collaborate with doctors Calmette (who also has a street named after him in Vietnam along with Yersin) and Roux to research a cure for the plague. Except for a few years (1902 – 1904) spent in Hanoi establishing a Medical College and several trips to France to visit Dr. Roux, for the rest of his life, Yersin lived and worked at the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang. Here, he and his colleagues specialized in observing animals and developing medicines for the treatment and prevention of diseases in cattle…
From 1905 to 1918, he served as the Director of the Pasteur Institutes in Saigon and Nha Trang. In 1925, he was appointed Inspector General of the Pasteur Institutes in Indochina. In 1933, after the passing of Drs. Roux and Calmette, he was invited back to France to take over as the Director of the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, but he declined, intending to stay in Vietnam for the rest of his life. Dr. Yersin’s name remains in the “Academy of Medicine” and the “Academy of Sciences”, and he was awarded the Second Class of the North Star Order and many international medals…
On March 1, 1943, Dr. Yersin passed away in Nha Trang at the age of 80. He was buried on a hill at the Suoi Dau plantation. According to his will, the funeral was extremely simple, but almost all the people in the area, from intellectuals to rural residents, came to pay their respects to him – a foreign doctor with an infinite humanitarian heart. He was truly a renowned physician, a daring adventurer, and an accomplished agricultural scientist.
