Fracastoro, Girolamo

FRACASTORO, GEROLAMO. - Humanist physician, b. in Verona in 1478, d. there in his villa at Incaffi on 8 Aug. 1553. In Padua he had Pomponazzi as his teacher and Copernicus as his companion.

Having denied the influence of the stars on diseases (Dies critici vel de dierum criticorum causis), he opened a path to precise scientific investigations in the work De contagione et contagiosis morbis, on account of which F. is considered today the precursor of Pasteur and Koch. A naturalist, philosopher, and poet, for his universal learning he was appointed by a brief of Paul III in 1545 «medicus conductus et stipendiatus» of the Council of Trent, and since an epidemic disease had broken out there in the spring of '47, he was favorable as a physician — and not «ut homo Pontificis» as Mencken asserted — to the transfer of the Council. Cardinal Farnese appointed him canon of Verona. An Aristotelian in the dialogues Nangerius sive de poetica, Turrins sive de intellectione, Fracastorius sive de anima (the De Gratia is still unpublished), he revealed himself as a poet, besides in the biblical narrative Joseph, unfinished, and in the Carmina super Gemertia, in the poem Syphilis, sive de morbo Gallico, in two books, dedicated to Bembo, in which, with fine Virgilian taste, he entrusted the dissemination of science to his rare gift of enlivening it with the values proper to poetry.