Girolamo Fracastoro

Italian physician, astronomer, and poet

• Born: c. 1478
• Birthplace: Verona, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: August 6, 1553
• Place of death: Incaffi, near Verona, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

Fracastoro’s prophetic hypotheses on the causes of diseases foreshadowed by centuries the modern understanding of microbial infections. He believed infection could be spread through direct or indirect contact by tiny, even insensible, particles. He also believed that poetry was the ideal means to convey knowledge.

Early Life

Girolamo Fracastoro (jeer-oh-LAHM-oh frah-cah-STAW-roh) was born into an old and distinguished Veronese family. His grandfather had been a physician to the reigning Scala family of Verona. After training at home, he was sent to the University of Padua, where he was entrusted to an old family friend, Girolamo della Torre, who taught and practiced medicine there.

Before his medical studies began, Fracastoro, following a well-established practice, pursued the liberal arts, which also included mathematics and astronomy, under Nicolo Leonico Tomeo and philosophy under Pietro Pomponazzi. Among his teachers of medicine was Alessandro Benedetti, through whom he could come in contact with the Ferrarese Humanistic medics, as well as with Girolamo della Torre and his son Marcus Antonio della Torre. Among his fellow students were the future cardinals Ercole Gonzaga, Gasparo Contarini, and Pietro Bembo, through whom he might have met members of the Aldine circle at Venice. He also befriended Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who gained fame in later life as a geographer.

Barely finished with his studies at Padua, Fracastoro was there appointed lecturer in logic in 1501 and the next year became an anatomical councillor, thus starting a traditional academic career in medicine. By 1508, wars interrupted his academic career, and the remainder of his life was spent at Verona, practicing medicine or managing his private landed estate at Incaffi. From 1505, when he had been elected to the College of Physicians at Verona, he remained its faithful member. His hour of glory arrived in 1545, when the pope made him physician of the Council of Trent.

Life’s Work

Venice had always maintained close ties with Constantinople, and when Padua came into its hands in 1404, Greek influence became dominant there as well. While in other parts of Italy, Humanists strove to revive Roman glories, Venice was more interested in resurrecting the achievements of the Greeks. At the University of Padua the prevailing form of Aristotelianism, originally developed by the Parisian Averroists, was one in which Aristotle was not perceived as the ultimate “master of those who know,” and his theories and methodologies were constructively criticized. Philosophical considerations were subordinated to his scientific work. Theology and metaphysics in general were gradually replaced by a closer study of nature. It was at the University of Padua that Fracastoro’s scientific outlook was formed.

The work that brought most fame to Fracastoro was a lengthy narrative poem Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus (1530; Syphilis: Or, A Poetical History of the French Disease , 1686), written in verses similar to Vergil’s Georgics (c. 37-29 b.c.e.). Fracastoro started working on this poem as early as 1510, but it was not until 1525 that it was presented in two books to Pietro Bembo, who at the time was considered to be the premier stylist. When it finally appeared in print in 1530 at Verona, it consisted of three books of some thirteen hundred hexameters.

In the first book, Fracastoro describes the horrors of the disease that had appeared in Europe and in a few years after 1495 spread across the whole continent. The disease was supposedly controlled by the sublime influence of the planets, which could be interpreted as the council of gods. The epidemic of syphilis was reminiscent of previous plagues and gave Fracastoro an opportunity to make allusions to pagan science, where the cosmic change is transmitted by the Lucretian seeds (semina) through the air.

The second book is devoted to cures. Fracastoro opens by describing his times, an age when disasters have been compensated for by the voyages of discovery. By judicious selection, he lists various cures and preventives for the disease, setting the whole in a bucolic mood. He concludes the book with the myth of Ilceo, a shepherd in Syria, who, like Adonis, kills a stag sacred to Diana. As a punishment, he is stricken with a dreadful malady of the skin for which there is no remedy. Ilceo, through a dream, is directed to the underworld, where he is met by the nymph Lipare, who instructs him to wash himself in the river of flowing silver (mercury), which allows him to shed his skin like a snake and in this way rid himself of the disease. The whole is permeated with the influence of Vergil.

Book 3 contains another extended myth forming a short epos, on Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the West Indies and the discovery of the Holy Tree, the guaiacum, which is a specific remedy against syphilis, which was endemic among the Caribbean Indians. The origin of this disease is explained by two stories. In the first, the indigenous are represented as survivors of Atlantis, which was destroyed by earthquakes and floods for its wickedness and afflicted by this dreaded disease. In the second story, Syphilis, another shepherd, blasphemed against Apollo the sun god and encouraged his king, Alcithous, to assume the prerogatives of a god. As a punishment, he was stricken by Apollo with this pestilence. After proper expiatory sacrifices were performed, Juno and later Apollo relented, the healing tree was provided by the gods, and Syphilis was cured.

It has been suggested that the subjects treated in this poem are but a pretext for positing the much deeper problem of the mutations that take place in nature. Nature constantly creates and destroys, distributing misery and happiness, without being influenced in any way by human prayers and supplications. It is only through science that humans can hope to tame nature and make it work for their benefit.

In 1538, Fracastoro published a work on astronomy, Homocentricorum sive de stellis (homocentricity on the stars), which he dedicated to Pope Paul III. He tried to represent the motions of the planets without having recourse to the epicycles or eccentrics and relying solely on circular motions about a single center (homocentric spheres). In this work, he was following the notions of two students of Plato, Eudoxus and Callippus, rather than ideas presented by Aristotle and developed by Ptolemy. Fracastoro’s theory represents one of the last attempts to solve the planetary riddle before Nicolaus Copernicus.

This same book also contained his tract, this time of medical interest, De causis criticorum dierum libellus (1538), in which Fracastoro rejected the astrological explanation of the critical days as being dependent on the quarters of the moon, a notion that had been accepted by Galen. Fracastoro postulated his theory on two grounds: that ascription of critical days to the virtue of number was false, because neither number nor quantity can be the principle of action, and that the days of a disease seldom coincided with the phases of the moon. Fracastoro did not reject critical days as such, but he believed the causes underlying them have to be sought in the nature of the disease itself, that is, qualitative and quantitative alterations of the humors.

Many scholars have praised Fracastoro as a forerunner of the germ theory of infectious diseases, ascribing to him prophetic intuition. Most of his thinking on this subject is found in his De contagionibus et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri tres (1546; De contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione , 1930), but one should remember that this tract is preceded in the same volume by his De sympathia et antipathia rerum (1546; on the attraction and repulsion of things), in which he stated that without understanding sympathy and antipathy one cannot deal with contagion. It is based on ancient theories of the continuity of nature and avoidance of a vacuum as well as the tendency of the elements toward their own natural places and the attraction of like for like. It is all expounded in terms of Aristotelian philosophy, without any trace of experimental method.

Regarding contagion, Fracastoro postulated three means by which disease can be spread: by simple contact, as in the case of scabies or leprosy; by fomites, such as clothing or bedsheets; or at a distance, through the propagation of seminaria morbi (seeds of contagion), which propagate either by joining humors that have the greatest affinity or by attraction, penetrating through vessels. These seminaria proliferate rapidly in the human body and cause the humor to which they have closest affinity to putrify. He believed, however, that these seeds of contagion perish in a dead body. As far as his explanations are concerned, Fracastoro remains a product of his time, but, when he concerned himself with observed clinical phenomena, he demonstrated an acute ability in differential diagnosis.

Among his philosophical works, one must count three dialogues dealing with poetics, the intellect, and the soul: Naugerius sive de poetica dialogus (1549; English translation, 1924), and “Turrius sive de intellectione dialogus” and “Fracastorius sive de anima dialogus,” which were published posthumously. The first of these is a panegyric of poetry as the most complete of the arts and the most useful. The second discusses such psychological problems as cognition, mind-object relationships, and the location of memory. It is interesting to note that Fracastoro believed a person to be a microcosm. The last dialogue was claimed to have been written to denounce the teachings of his professor at Padua, Pomponazzi, who promoted the idea that the human soul is perishable; yet not one harsh word can be found against him in this work. Basically, it is an attempt to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity, relying not on dogmatic assertions but on experimental procedure and critical reasoning, which he was forced to abandon when he realized to which conclusions it was leading. In the end, Fracastoro himself was forced to assume a theological position.

Fracastoro produced various other shorter works of literary as well as scientific interest, some of which were printed centuries after his death, on August 6, 1553. He remains an exemplar of Italian Humanism, who, contrary to accepted wisdom, began to show interest in natural sciences.

Significance

Fracastoro better than anyone else demonstrated the aspirations as well as the limitations of premodern science. To him poetry was the preferred vehicle to transmit information, and he was more concerned with demonstrating to his readers his classical erudition than his medical acumen. He can easily stand for the typical post-Renaissance man, who is clearly exhibiting his intellectual roots.

He is almost an exact replica of Dante, though more than two centuries separate them and no one reading Andreas Vesalius would realize that he and Fracastoro were contemporaries. Yet most people tend to accept the great anatomist as a typical representative of the medical mentality of his age and try to make Fracastoro fit that mold. The fundamental difference between Fracastoro and Dante was their attitudes toward authority. Dante lived in a world of tamed Aristotelianism, where natural philosophy was still the preserve of the theologians, whereas Fracastoro was educated by physicians who believed in the separation of the two realms of theology and science; it was this new attitude that made the scientific revolution possible.

Bibliography

Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Examination of the responses of various social institutions including the church, the medical community, royal courts, and local governments to the emergence of syphilis in Renaissance Italy, France, and Germany. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Fracastoro, Girolamo. Fracastoro’s “Syphilis.” Translated with introduction, text, and notes by Geoffrey Eatough. Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1984. Written mainly from the point of view of a literary scholar who stresses Fracastoro’s poetic achievements. Contains a detailed analysis of the poem Syphilis. Includes a computer-generated word index.

Greswell, W. Parr, trans. Memoirs of Angelus Politianus, Joannes Picus of Mirandula, Actius Sincerus Sannazarius, Petrus Bembus, Hieronymus Fracastorius, Marcus Antonius Flaminius, and the Amalthei. Manchester, England: Cadell and Davies, 1805. An early biography of Fracastoro, based primarily on an even earlier life by F. O. Mencken. It is concerned primarily with Fracastoro as a literary figure. Especially good on reporting on his contemporaries’ opinions about him. Contains notes and observations by Greswell.

Haskell, Yasmin. “Between Fact and Fiction: The Renaissance Didactic Poetry of Fracastoro, Palingenio, and Valvasone.” In Poets and Teachers: Latin Didactic Poetry and the Didactic Authority of the Latin Poet from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Yasmin Haskell and Philip Hardie. Bari, Italy: Levante, 1999. Examination of the fictitious science or scientific fictions of Fracastoro. Includes bibliographic references.

Rosebury, Theodor. Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Two chapters are devoted to Fracastoro, dealing specifically with syphilis as a medical problem. This book presents the best semipopular treatment of the origins of syphilis and whether it was brought from the Americas by the crews of Columbus.

Thorndike, Lynn. “Fracastoro, 1478-1553.” In A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol. 5. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. A short critical treatment of Fracastoro’s scientific contributions. Thorndike was one of the first to argue that the Middle Ages were not quite as dark or the Renaissance quite as brilliant as had been commonly accepted. In making this point, Thorndike uses evidence skillfully.

Truffi, Mario. “Fracastor’s Life.” In Syphilis, by Hieronymus Fracastor. St. Louis: Urologic & Cutaneus Press, 1931. A rather laudatory treatment of Fracastoro, written by a physician and slanted toward medical aspects of his life. A good counterbalance for the previous entry.