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Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553) was an Italian physician, scientist, writer and poet. He was born in Verona in 1478. He studied law in Bologna before entering the University of Padua, around 1501, where he studied mathematics, philosophy and medicine and where he was professor of Logic.
He then retired to Verona to practice medicine, achieving success and recognition. He is considered a precursor of microbiology and epidemiology.
Epidemiology is the branch of medicine that studies the phenomena, distribution and determinants of states and events related to health and disease.
He wrote books of high interest in the history of medicine: one is a poem to report on a new disease in Europe, syphilis.
He published Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus (1530), a work dedicated to Cardinal Pietro Bembo, a well-known scholar and papal secretary. The poem has three books. In the first, Fracastoro describes the beginnings of the disease and the confusion it caused. The second deals with the various treatments. The third text is the allegorical story of a shepherd named Syphilus, who for worshiping a worldly king, receives punishment from the sun god. Consequently he suffers from the disease.
After the editio princeps of 1530, he knew 43 Latin editions, 23 Italian translations, 4 French, another 4 German, 9 English, 1 Portuguese and 1 Spanish (1863).
Fracastoro belonged to the Italian Renaissance and classical humanism. He had a desire for new discoveries, such as astronomy, where it could be said in a limited way that he anticipated Copernicus.
Another book, even more important, is De contagione et contagiosis morbis (1546), which provides an incipient theory on the contagion of diseases and is considered the first text that talks about this topic in the history of medicine, published in 1546. It is an insightful comparison of observation and reasoning.
Fracastoro was the first to clearly establish the concept of contagious disease, to propose a form of contagion secondary to the transmission of what he called seminaria contagiorum (that is, live seeds capable of causing the disease) and to establish at least three possible forms. of infection: by direct contact (such as rabies and leprosy), by means of fomites carrying the seminaria prima (such as the clothes of the sick) and by inspiration of air or miasmas infected with the seminaria (as in phthisis).
It is where for the first time they describe all the diseases that could be classified as contagious (plague, leprosy, consumption, scabies, rabies, erysiprela, anthrax and trachoma) and add, as new diseases, exanthematous typhus and syphilis.
He was the first doctor to establish that specific diseases result from specific contagions, presenting the first general theory of living contagion of disease.
Famed and celebrated for his academic activities, Fracastoro was honored by princes and sought after by clerics.
For a time, Pope Paul III appointed him medicus ordinarius, which is why he recommended moving the Council of Trent to Bologna, in order to avoid a plague epidemic.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 75. Within two years, the Veronese honored him with a stone monument located in the Plaza de los Señores.
Fracastoro was a passionate cultivator of the great classics and studied Plato, Aristotle, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and the poets Virgil and Lucretius, whom he tried to imitate in poetry on Christian or biblical themes (Carmina super Genesim, Joseph).
Also notable are the dialogues Fracastorius sive de anima, Turrius sive de intellectione, De gratia and El Navajero or Dialogue of poetics, in which he defends poetry against Platonic tendencies and renews about it the concepts already exposed by Dante Alighieri in De vulgari eloquentia.
All medical historians consider Girolamo Fracastoro the precursor of modern pathology, founded in the 19th century on the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.
Considering contagion as sustained and transmitted by hypothetical “seedbeds” of living nature (what we know today as germs of infectious diseases), Fracastoro comes to conceive the need for disinfection, through the violent death of germs.
As Pazzini says, Fracastoro laid the foundations of a science that did not have the rapid development of a plant that can be seen growing overnight, but rather the depth of the roots of the oak, which grows more slowly but more tenaciously.
