[Alain Georges: in the footsteps of Louis Pasteur and Eugène Jamot]

The biography of the physician general Alain Jean Georges (1946-2012) shows the exceptional career of a military physician-clinical pathologist specialized in tropical medicine and educated at the Navy Health School in Bordeaux and the Pharo School in Marseille. He completed his education at the Institut Pasteur de Paris in courses still conducted in the spirit of those taught by Louis Pasteur. In 1979, he became director of the Pasteur Institute of Bangui, following in the steps of Eugène Jamot, in the long tradition of military doctors from the Institut Pasteur overseas network committed to a career in Africa. For more than 12 years, Alain Georges directed the Pasteur Institute of Bangui, one of the last citadels of French postcolonial military medicine, in a very personal and charismatic style. He was thus a pioneer in research about both AIDS in Africa and hemorrhagic fevers. His methods were widely misunderstood later as the traditional networks of French biomedical research in its former African colonies modernized and opened internationally, including to national elites. Alain Georges was probably one of the last important figures of the golden age of French colonial medicine.