Shortly after discovering the tuberculosis bacillus, the German scientist Robert Koch isolated Vibrio cholerae while working in Egypt in 1883. Koch had inadvertently replicated Pacini’s discovery of thirty years earlier, but the Italian’s work had been ignored by the scientific establishment, and so it was Koch who won the initial round of acclaim for identifying the agent that had caused so much trauma over the preceding century. History would come around to the Italian, though. In 1965, Vibrio cholerae was formally renamed Vibrio cholerae Pacini 1854.
