Twenty-five years after Snow’s death in 1858, the German bacteriologist, Robert Koch, employed his microscope to isolate the actual cause of cholera, infection by the disease agent cholerae vibrio. Although Koch was credited by the scientific community as the discoverer into the 1960s and beyond, the Italian bacteriologist Filippo Pacini actually discovered this agent, also under the microscope, in the year of the Broad Street cholera outbreak, 1854. Ironically and tragically, Pacini died largely unheralded in the year that Koch rediscovered cholerae vibrio, 1883.

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