Special stamp range marks Vietnam-France ties
(VOV) - A range of stamps commemorating the 150th birthday of Doctor Alexandre Yersin has been launched concurrently in capitals Hanoi and Paris.
The French Embassy in Vietnam includes the range in its “50 notable activities” of the 2013 France-Vietnam Year
This is the second collaborative stamp range jointly produced by France and Vietnam. In October 2008, the two countries issued a collection celebrating the landscape of France’s Bonifacio and Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay.
Yersin was born in Switzerland in 1863. He graduated from the University of Paris in 1887, left for Indochina in 1890, and established the small Nha Trang-based research lab which would eventually become the Nha Trang Pasteur Institute.
He was the founder of the Hanoi Medical University, as well as its first director.
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His researches into microorganisms were integral to humanity’s fight against diphtheria, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, and dengue fever.
Yersin is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague. It was later renamed in his honour (Yersinia pestis).
He was also pioneer in Vietnamese rubber tree cultivation, and an explorer who surveyed the Lam Vien Plateau, now Da Lat City.
Yersin passed away in 1943 after more than half a century in Nha Trang. He is remembered as a talented scientist, a kind-hearted doctor, and a benefactor of the Vietnamese people.