 His father was a pastor of the Reformed Church.From 1878 to 1882 Simond was an assistant in Medical and Biological Sciences at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bordeaux, and he began his medical training there.From 1882 to 1886 he served as director of a leprosarium near Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana, where he contracted an attenuated form of yellow fever.