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The development of entomology and medical entomology in France is discussed in the context of the prevalence of Lamarckian ideas concerning heredity and evolution. Lamarckian ideas have greatly influenced research carried out at the Institut Pasteur by Emile Roubaud and more generally in Felix Mesnil's laboratory, as well as research in general entomology at the Museum national d'histoire naturelle. By contrast, it did not influence research and teaching at the Faculté de médecine of Paris or that of physicians more generally including those in overseas Instituts Pasteur, which clearly kept away from theoretical discussion concerning the origin of variations and adaptation in insects of medical interest.

During the first thirty years of the XXth century, parasitologists and epidemiologists who were at the origin of the nosography and etiology of parasitic diseases were faced with several overlapping problems. A person can be infected simultaneoulsy by several different parasites. The delineation of clinical signs is an essential step, in the field and without the help of the laboratory, to identify the various parasitic pathologies and to propose the most likely diagnoses. The use of photography as a nosographic tool enabled the French parasitologist Emile Brumpt (1877-1951) to set up clinical pictures, given the multiplicity of pathologies on a given patient (for instance, goitre and ankylostomiasis, ankylostomiasis and myxoedema, "sylvan" leishmaniasis and palpebral oedema, goitre and Chagas' disease). We will set the paper on a part of Brumpt's photographic archives which he constitued during his missions to South America between 1913 and 1914.

The description of clinical signs and the geographical distribution of the presently known tropical diseases have markedly varied with time. These changes are largely due to the migration of the diseases, to the increasing precision of the nosography and finally, the identification of autochthonous diseases and of their vectors. The sequence of events that led to the present distribution of tropical diseases in Brazil is deduced from XIXth century treatises of "Géographie médicale".

The role of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation in campaigns for malaria control in many countries has clearly been documented extensively. In contrast, the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in the control of malaria in France has not been reported yet. The present paper describes the way in which the Rockefeller Foundation got involved, along with the parasitologist Emile Brumpt, in the anti-malaria campaigns in Corsica, France, between 1924 and 1951. We analyze the scientific and technological strategies used for that purpose and the manner in which the Rockefeller Foundation policy had influenced Brumpt's actions. The unusually long support of the Rockefeller Foundation to Emile Brumpt (1924-1948) and to research and teaching Parasitology in the Faculté de Médecine de Paris is also discussed.