Ruggero Oddi

Ruggero Oddi was a curious fellow. He was curious about the workings of the human body. He also lived a strange and curious life. Both aspects of this curiosity put him outside of the mainstream of 19^th century Italy society and the scientific community.

As a 23 year old medical student in Florence in 1887, Oddi was dissecting a cadaver when his curiosity drew him towards a tiny circular ring muscle in the gut of the body. The muscle connected the gall bladder to the small intestine. This small muscle had actually been identified nearly 200 years earlier but no one could explain its purpose.

It was Oddi that recognized that this sphincter was the critical seam that maintained the proper chemical balance within the small intestine. This sphincter needs open only slightly to let the right amount of bile flow from the gall bladder, passing through the seams of the ring muscle. Oddi determined that the bile surged through the sphincter or valve as the seams hiss under the pressure of the critical flow of the highly acidic liquid. As a result of Oddi’s identification of the function of this muscle, it has been known ever since as Oddi’s sphincter.

Oddi continued to achieve precocious success. At the early age of 29 years, he was appointed as the director of the Physiological Institute at Genoa. He appeared poised for a long and prominent career in medicine. But then his life took some curious turns. First, he became curious about various drugs and began to use them himself. This led to failures as an administrator and fiscal improprieties. Ultimately, he was relieved of his eminent position in Italian Physiology at the age of 34. From there, he sought employment as a physician in the Belgian colonial medical service and briefly spent time in the Congo. But his continued use of nardcotics caused rapid deterioration of his physical and mental condition and led to the complete demise of his medical career. He returned to Italy and lived in obscurity for several years, occasionally resurfacing to publish papers in medical journals. Finally, he again returned to Africa where he died in Tunisia at the age of 46.

Oddi left no family and would be completely lost to history were it not for the sphincter named after him. But even the sphincter itself has been the subject of much study and controversy. Its very existence as a distinct anatomic entity has been disputed. It is possible that Oddi’s sphincter may eventually disappear, just as did its namesake.