11 Facts About Filippo Pacini

Filippo Pacini was an Italian anatomist, posthumously famous for isolating the cholera bacterium Vibrio cholerae in 1854, well before Robert Koch's more widely accepted discoveries 30 years later.

Filippo Pacini learned his job as a doctor and how to examine and dissect dead bodies under a microscope.

In 1831, during a dissection class, Filippo Pacini discovered small sensory organs in the nervous system which can detect pressure and vibrations.

Filippo Pacini studied them closely from 1833 on, and first discussed them in 1835 at the Societa medico-fisica in Florence, but did not publish his research until 1840.

Filippo Pacini served as an assistant to Paolo Savi in Pisa from 1840 to 1843, then began working at the Institute of Human Anatomy.

Filippo Pacini was professor of anatomy at the University of Pisa from 1844 to 1846.

In 1847, Filippo Pacini began teaching at the Lyceum in Florence, and then was named chair of General and Topographic Anatomy at the "Istituto di Studi Superiori" at the University of Florence in 1849, where he remained to the end of his career.

Filippo Pacini published a paper in 1854 entitled, "Microscopical observations and pathological deductions on cholera" in which he described the organism and its relation to the disease.

Filippo Pacini's work was repeatedly published and readily available to the international scientific community via the English translation published in The British and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review, Volume 38, July 1866.

Filippo Pacini spent most of the money remaining after his scientific investigations on the long-term care of his two ailing sisters, Assunta and Maria Giustina.

Filippo Pacini died nearly penniless in Florence on July 9,1883, and was buried in the cemetery of the Misericordia.