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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