Arthur Felix, 1887-1956

Abstract

The death of Arthur Felix has deprived medical bacteriology of one of its unique personalities. Trained as a chemist, chance circumstances brought him into association with Edmund Weil, the eminent German bacteriologist, during the first world war and thus launched him on a career which was, in its entirety, the logical development of the important discoveries with which the names of these two men are linked. The first of these was the diagnostic test in typhus fever known as the Weil-Felix reaction and investigation of this led, in turn, to the discovery of the H and O antigens of organisms of the Proteus and enteric groups. Following Weil’s untimely death in 1922, Felix brilliantly applied their observations on these antigens to the solution of an apparently insuperable difficulty that had arisen in the serodiagnosis of enteric fevers in vaccinated persons. The inevitable result of this work was that he became interested in problems of effective serum treatment and vaccine prophylaxis and in 1934 he demonstrated that virulent strains of the typhoid bacillus possess an additional antigen which he named the Vi antigen. One of the sequels to this discovery was the development of the epidemiologically important method of typhoid Vi phage typing. Felix adopted this in 1940 and when the war ended there began the final phase of his career which was increasingly devoted to the development and international standardization of enteric phage typing.