Robert Koch identified the cholera bacterium in 1883 in Alexandria and confirmed the finding in Calcutta a few months later. But an Italian had identified the same comma-shaped organism nearly 30 years earlier, and been ignored. Who?
Pacini described the comma-shaped *Vibrio* in cholera victims at Florence during the 1854 outbreak — the same outbreak that drove John Snow's investigation of the Broad Street pump in London. He published in Italian in a regional medical journal and was ignored by mainstream European medicine for 30 years. The bacterium's formal name was retroactively changed to *Vibrio cholerae* Pacini 1854 by the International Committee on Bacteriological Nomenclature in 1965. Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) saw bacteria 150 years too early to know what they were. Pasteur was Koch's living rival, not a cholera-priority claimant. Galileo was an astronomer, dead 200 years.
Read the full story →Robert Koch went to Alexandria in 1883 to find the cause of cholera. He found it on the second day and confirmed it in Calcutta four months later. John Snow had been right thirty years earlier without ever seeing the bacterium.
Related questions
- In which two cities did Robert Koch identify and confirm the cholera bacillus in 1883–84?
- In October 1892, the Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer drank a flask of *Vibrio cholerae* sent to him by Koch's institute. Why?
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