FRACASTORO, GEROLAMO. - Humanist physician, born in Verona in 1478, died at his villa in Incaffi on 8 August 1533. While studying in Padua, he had Pomponazzi as his teacher and Copernicus as his fellow student.
Rejecting the influence of the stars on diseases (*Dies criticis vel de dierum criticorum causis*), he opened the way to precise scientific inquiry in his work *De contagione et contagiosis morbis*, for which F. is today considered the precursor of Pasteur and Koch. A naturalist, philosopher, and poet, his universal learning led Pope Paul III, in a brief of 1545, to appoint him "medicus conductus et stipendiatus" to the Council of Trent. When an epidemic broke out there in the spring of 1547, he acted as a physician—unlike Moncken’s claim that he did so "as a man of the Pope"—in favor of transferring the Council. Cardinal Farnese appointed him canon of Verona. In his Aristotelian dialogues *Nangerius sive de poetica*, *Turrius sive de intellectibus*, and *Fracastorius sive de anima* (the *De Gratia* is still attributed to him), he revealed himself as a poet, not only in the unfinished biblical narrative *Joseph* and in the *Carmina super Genesis*, but also in the poem *Syphilis, sive de morbo Gallico*, in two books, dedicated to Bembo. In this work, with Virgilian refinement, he entrusted the dissemination of science to his rare gift of enlivening it with the proper values of poetry.