Alfonso Corti and the discovery of the hearing organ: the man, his life, his works

Alfonso Corti was 28 years old when he wrote the first draft of his most famous work (Recherches sur l’organe de l’ouïe des mammifères) while in Paris in 1850, probably at the Sorbonne. His work was published in June of the following year. The human and scientific story of this young medical student is fascinating. He left Pavia, the city of his youth and where he had begun his medical studies, and went to complete them in Vienna, where he graduated. He then continued his studies in several European cities – in Bern, Paris, London, Utrecht, and Würzburg – before completely cutting all his ties with the scientific world to which he had been so dedicated when he was just 32 years of age. The name of Corti quickly became known throughout the world, and synonymous with the organ of hearing, thanks to Joseph Hyrtl and Albert Kölliker, who had been his teachers and mentors. Almost nothing was known about Alfonso Corti as a scholar, however, until the publication of biographical articles by Gottfried Brückner (1913) and Josef Schaffer (1914), and especially the monograph by Bruno Pincherle published in 1932. With this paper 1, coinciding with the bicentenary of Corti’s birth, we wanted to explore this man’s human and scientific history.