Palais du Pharo

This guide to the Palais du Pharo in Marseille follows the palace Napoleon III built in 1858 as a home for Empress Eugenie, who never lived in it, and its turn afterward into a Marseille hospital treating cholera and tuberculosis. It then traces the military school for tropical medicine that opened on the grounds in 1905, and Paul-Louis Simond, the doctor who arrived with proof from Bombay that fleas, not rats, spread plague. More than nine thousand physicians trained on these grounds over the following century.