FRACASTORO, GEROLAMO. - Humanist physician, born in Verona in 1478, died there at his villa in Incaffi on 8 Aug. 1553. At Padua he had Pomponazzi as his teacher and Copernico as his fellow student.
Having denied the influence of the stars upon diseases (Dies critici vel de dierum criticorum causis), he opened the way to precise scientific investigations in the work De contagione et contagiosis morbis, for which F. is today considered the precursor of Pasteur and Koch. A naturalist, philosopher, and poet, on account of his universal learning he was appointed by a brief of Paolo III in 1545 «medicus conductus et stipendiatus» of the Council of Trent; and when an epidemic disease broke out there in the spring of 1547, he was in favour, as a physician—and not «ut homo Pontificis», as Mencken asserted—of transferring the Council. Card. Farnese appointed him canon of Verona. An Aristotelian in the dialogues Nangerius sive de poetica, Turrins sive de intellectione, Fracastorius sive de anima (De Gratia is still unpublished), he revealed himself a poet, besides in the unfinished biblical narrative Joseph and in the Carmina super Gemertia, in the two-book poem Syphilis, sive de morbo Gallico, dedicated to Bembo, in which, with refined Virgilian taste, he entrusted the dissemination of science to his rare gift for enlivening it with the distinctive values of poetry.
BIBL. G. F., Opera omnia, Venice 1555, Padua 1718. Studies: F. O. Mencken, De vita, scriptis, moribus meritique H. F., Leipzig 1731; E. Di Leo, Scienza e umanismo in G. F., Salerno 1937; E. Pellegrini, L'epidemia di «morbus paticulare» del 1546-47 e il medico del Concilio di Trento, Milan 1948; id., L'inedito nel dialogo fracastoriano Fracastorius sive de anima, Verona 1948; id., G. F., Trieste 1948 (with bibliography). Giovanni Pallini