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Robert Koch

6 stories mention Robert Koch on DeadlyCurious.

The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany

The Florentine Anatomist Who Found the Cholera Bacterium Thirty Years Before Anyone Listened

Filippo Pacini examined the intestinal tissue of cholera victims in Florence in 1854 — the same year [John Snow](/articles/john-snow-broad-street-pump) was mapping the Broad Street pump — and identified a comma-shaped bacterium he called *Vibrio cholerae*. The discovery was published in Italian, in an Italian journal, and was almost entirely ignored. [Robert Koch](/articles/robert-koch-cholera-1883) rediscovered the same organism in Egypt in 1883 and got the credit.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Munich Institute of Hygiene

The German Hygienist Who Drank a Flask of Cholera to Prove Robert Koch Wrong

In October 1892 the Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer asked [Robert Koch's](/articles/robert-koch-cholera-1883) laboratory to send him a fresh culture of *Vibrio cholerae*. He drank approximately a billion organisms in a flask of beef broth, in front of academic witnesses, to demonstrate that the bacterium alone could not cause cholera. He survived the experiment. Nine years later he shot himself.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Berlin Institute of Hygiene

The Cholera Hero's Therapeutic Vaccine for Tuberculosis Killed Patients and Almost Destroyed His Reputation

Robert Koch announced a tuberculosis cure in August 1890 — a glycerol extract from the tuberculosis bacterium that he called *tuberculin*. Within nine months it was substantially clear the substance did not cure tuberculosis and that it had killed several hundred patients. The fiasco nearly destroyed Koch's career.

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The Footnote June 23, 2026 · Buckingham Palace, London

The Doctor Who Mapped the Soho Cholera Pump Also Anaesthetised Queen Victoria's Last Two Childbirths

John Snow is remembered for the 1854 Broad Street pump and the founding of modern epidemiology. His other career — as the leading 19th-century English authority on inhaled anaesthesia — is less famous but at the time was substantially more profitable. He gave Queen Victoria chloroform during the births of her eighth and ninth children.

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