Émile Arthur Vallin (27 November 1833 in Nantes – 27 February 1924 in Montpellier) was a French military physician, considered to be a precursor of public health in France[1] a convinced Pasteurian.

[1][4] In 1874, as full professor of military hygiene and forensic medicine at the École du Val-de-Grâce, he travelled to the major cities of Europe to study their health organisations and institutions, and everywhere he noted the inferiority in France in this field.

[10] At the Academy of Medicine, he was interested in alcoholisation,[11] the dangers of mobile stoves, the pathogenesis of heat stroke, disinfection in contagious diseases, alcoholism through breast-feeding, typhoid fever in Paris, stinging caterpillars and the sickness in the basins of silkworm farms and the prophylaxis of tuberculosis.

[4] He is also the author of reports on the use of salicylic acid and its derivatives in foodstuffs (1886), on epidemic diseases requiring compulsory declaration (1893), on the sanitary services and the Lazaret of Frioul (1902), on the supply of drinking water to the garrisons (1903).

[12] In 1877, with Alexandre Lacassagne and Apollinaire Bouchardat, he was a founding member of the Société de Médecine publique et d'Hygiène professionnelle (Society of Public Medicine and Professional Hygiene).

As early as 1884, he recommended that: Tuberculosis be included in the lists of contagious livestock diseases, which obliged livestock breeders to declare it, isolate the sick animals, slaughter them and destroy the meat, which was made possible in 1888 with the publication of a first presidential decree[13].He became Paul Brouardel's right-hand man on the Advisory Committee on Public Hygiene which depended on the authority of the Minister of the Interior[14] and in 1889, Pasteur, Brouardel and Vallin, during the Exposition Universelle, invited the members of the departmental hygiene councils to take part in a congress devoted to prophylaxis.