Calmette Street and Bridge

The street descending toward Bến Nghé Canal and the bridge over the water bear the surname of the French doctor Albert Calmette. At first, this road was listed as number thirty-two, then it was called Bourde Street. In nineteen fifty-five, Ngô Đình Diệm's administration was changing Saigon's French names, but for this street it chose the name of another Frenchman—Calmette.

He arrived in Saigon in eighteen ninety-one as a doctor in the colonial medical service. Louis Pasteur assigned him to establish production here of vaccines against smallpox and rabies. Calmette was given two rooms at a military hospital. He received a state salary and was expected to supply the whole of French Indochina with vaccines, although at first he did not even have a separate building.

Distributing the smallpox vaccination was especially difficult. Vaccine material was taken from a blister on the arm of a recently vaccinated child and transferred to the arm of the next child. Child donors had to be taken from village to village. Parents almost never agreed voluntarily, and officials resorted to coercion. Syphilis or leprosy could be transmitted along with the material.

Calmette decided to remove children from this chain. Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital sent him vaccine material obtained from animals, packed in ice. In Saigon, the doctor first vaccinated calves, but the local animals proved too weak. He then switched to buffalo calves, which tolerated the climate here better. The resulting material was mixed with glycerin and sealed into tubes: it could now be transported without taking a child along with it.

As early as eighteen ninety-one, about one hundred twenty thousand vaccinations were administered under this system. Parents no longer had to give up recently vaccinated children for trips through the villages, and the laboratory created by Calmette became the first Pasteur Institute outside France.

Those first rooms were far from here, on the grounds of what is now Children's Hospital 2. Neither the laboratory nor Calmette's house has survived by the canal. The present six-lane bridge opened after reconstruction in January two thousand nine, to connect the center with the neighborhoods on the other bank. Here, all that remains of the doctor's work is his surname: it begins on a road sign, runs along the street, and continues over Bến Nghé Canal.