Fracastoro, Girolamo (redirected from Hieronymus Fracastorius)

Fracastoro, Girolamo (jērô`lämō fräkästô`rō), 1483–1553, Italian physician and poet. He was born in Verona, where he practiced after studying at Padua. He studied epidemic diseases and attributed their spread to tiny particles, or spores, that could transmit infection by direct or indirect contact or even without contact over long distances. He wrote a long poem (1530) on syphilis, from the title of which the disease takes its name.

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Fracastoro, Girolamo

 Latin Hieronymus Fracastorius

(born c. 1478, Verona, Republic of Venice—died Aug. 8, 1553, Caffi, near Verona) Italian physician, poet, astronomer, and geologist. He is best known for Syphilis, or the French Disease (1530), an account in rhyme of the disease he named. His intense study of epidemic diseases led to his On Contagion and Contagious Diseases (1546). The first scientific statement of the true nature of contagion, infection, disease germs, and modes of disease transmission, it stated that each disease is caused by a different type of rapidly multiplying minute body, transmitted by direct contact, by carriers such as soiled clothing or through the air. Widely praised in his time, Fracastoro's theory, soon obscured by the mystical doctrines of Paracelsus, fell into general disrepute until Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch proved it 300 years later.

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Fracastoro, Girolamo 

Born 1478 in Verona; died there Aug. 8, 1553. Italian Renaissance physician, astronomer, and poet.

In 1502, Fracastoro graduated from the university in Padua and subsequently became a professor there. His first scientific works dealt with geology (the history of the earth), geography, optics (light refraction), astronomy (observation of the moon and stars), philosophy, and psychology. In 1530 he published the scientific didactic poem Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus (Syphilis, or the French Disease), from which the disease received its name.

In his major work, De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione (On Contagion, Contagious Diseases, and Treatment; 1546), which has been repeatedly reprinted in many countries, Fracastoro presented his theory for the nature, transmission, and treatment of contagious diseases. He described three pathways of infection: (1) through direct contact, (2) through objects known as fomites, (3) over a distance, by way of imperceptible seeds of contagion, which he called seminaria. According to Fracastoro, an infection has a material basis (“contagion is corporal”). Fracastoro was the first to use the term “infection” in the medical sense. He described smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, consumption, rabies, leprosy, and typhus. In the development of his views of the contagious nature of infections, he partially retained (in regard to syphilis) earlier concepts of the transmission of these diseases through a miasma.

Fracastoro’s works laid the foundations for epidemiology and the clinical treatment of infectious diseases.

WORKS

Opera omnia. Venice, 1584.
In Russian translation:
O kontagii, kontagioznykh bolezniakh i lechenii, fascs. 1–3. Introductory article by P. E. Zabludovskii. Moscow, 1954.
O sifilise. Moscow, 1956.

P. E. ZABLUDOVSKII