Fracastoro's De Contagione

Fracastoro named syphilis before he tried to explain how diseases spread. His Latin poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus, printed in four editions between 1530 and 1536, tells of a shepherd named Syphilis who insults the god of the sun and is punished with a horrible disease. The poem recommends mercury and guaiac as cures, and it gave the disease its name.

Girolamo Fracastoro was born around 1478 into a noble family of Verona. He studied medicine, literature and philosophy at the University of Padua, took his medical degree there in 1502 and taught at Padua for several years. He then went home to Verona, where he practiced medicine for about two decades. He was remembered as a small man with broad shoulders, long hair, a round face and black eyes, and Verona later put up a statue in his memory.

His book on contagion came out in Venice in 1546 from the press of the heirs of Lucantonio Giunta, printed with a one-book work on sympathy and antipathy. It described contagious diseases and the ways they spread. Fracastoro proposed that infection passed by means of tiny seeds of contagion, which he likened to spores, and he used the word fomites, from the Latin fomes, tinder fungus. Clothes and linen, he wrote, though not corrupt themselves, could harbor the seeds of contagion and so cause infection.

New York University's rare book collection notes that his theory shaped thinking about contagion for some three hundred years, until the microbial nature of disease was worked out, and Southern Methodist University's Bridwell Library places the 1546 book in the history of epidemiology. Fracastoro died in 1553, and his collected works were first printed two years later.