Background
Girolamo Fracastoro was born in 1478 in Verona, Italy. He was a descendant of a patrician Veronese family and the sixth of seven brothers. His mother, Camilla Mascarelli, seems to have died when he was still very young.
Via 8 Febbraio 1848, 2, 35122 Padova PD, Italy
As an adolescent, Girolamo was sent to the Academy in Padua (today the University of Padua), where he was entrusted to a family friend, Girolamo Della Torre, a Veronese who taught and practiced medicine there.
Astronomer geologist physician scientist poet
Girolamo Fracastoro was born in 1478 in Verona, Italy. He was a descendant of a patrician Veronese family and the sixth of seven brothers. His mother, Camilla Mascarelli, seems to have died when he was still very young.
Fracastoro received his first literary and philosophical instruction from his father. As an adolescent, he was sent to the Academy in Padua (today the University of Padua), where he was entrusted to a family friend, Girolamo Della Torre, a Veronese who taught and practiced medicine there. Fracastoro studied literature, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine, in which he was instructed by Girolamo Della Torre and his son Marcantonio, and Alessandro Benedetti. He received his degree in 1502.
After graduating, Girolamo became an instructor in logic at the University of Padua, where he was also conciliarius anatomicus. His contacts with Copernicus, who had enrolled in medicine at Padua in 1501, date from this time.
After the death of his father and the closing of the University of Padua and with the threat of war between Venice and the Emperor Maximilian I, Fracastoro left Padua and in 1508 followed Bartolomeo d’Alviano to Porto Naone (now Pordenone) in Friuli, where Alviano presented him at the Accademia Friulana. After a short stay, he followed Alviano to the border of the Veneto, apparently as a doctor. Alviano was taken prisoner at Giara d’Adda, after the Venetian defeat at the battle of Agnadello in 1509. Fracastoro returned to Verona and established residence in the area of the church of Santa Eufemia.
He then dedicated himself to his studies, to reorganizing his estate, and, for a while, to medical practice, treating patients from all over Italy. He actively participated in the life of the local collegio dei fisici, where he had already matriculated in 1501 and of which he was four times prior and eight times councillor. Although interested in politics, he never held public office.
Fracastoro’s fame, esteem, and acquaintances in ecclesiastical circles contributed to his nomination by Pope Paul III in 1545 as medicus conductus et stipendiatus of the Council of Trent, to which he went upon request, a guest of Cardinal Madruzzo. His presentiment of a terrible epidemic seems to have influenced the transfer, which the pope desired, of the Council from Trent to Bologna. Around 1546 Fracastoro was made canon of Verona, with special dispensations.
Fracastoro’s scientific personality matured in the atmosphere of Padua, where he had ample opportunity to enter into the disputes of the Scholastics and the followers of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Ibn Rushd. Philosophical considerations were thus always inherent in his more purely scientific work. His thought, although not always organic, is framed in those philosophies of nature which were developed by various writers of the Italian Renaissance and which are the result of two components, a diminished interest in theological subjects and metaphysics in general and an increased interest in the study of nature, in which man lives and which is held to be the only subject appropriate to his understanding, which requires certainty. This interest in nature differs from that of the preceding era, that is, of the humanists: the contemplative aspect gives way to the operative one. That is, nature is considered as an autonomous reality, upheld by its own laws, in which a mixture of good and bad is inherent and before which any recourse to supernatural intervention is useless; to derive the most profit and happiness, man must rely only on himself and on his capacity for progressive understanding of the world’s regulating principles. These ideas emerge in the narrative poem Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus, which brought Fracastoro universal fame, as is attested by numerous editions and translations in various languages. In it the nature and cure of lues are illustrated.
Composed in 1521, the poem was initially divided into two books. In the final draft it was published in three books, despite advice to the contrary by Pietro Bembo, to whom it is dedicated and by whom it was esteemed and praised, both when it was sent to him by Fracastoro for a preliminary reading in 1525 and subsequently.
The poem, drafted in Latin hexameter of exquisite beauty, occupies a prominent place in the literature of the times and represents a magnificent paradigm of formal sixteenth-century virtuosity in refined Latin of a didactic quality reminiscent of Vergil’s Georgics. Through the work the name of the sickness became definitively established; the name was, in fact, considered to derive from that of the hero of Fracastoro’s treatise, the unfortunate shepherd Sifilo. Others believe that the word sifilo derived from sifilide, a term already in use in the local dialect of the Veneto.
In De morbo Gallico the author lays the first foundations of his doctrine of infections, since he was already familiar with the semina morbi of Lucretius through Andrea Navagero’s edition of De rerum natura. The concepts of contagion indicated in De morbo Gallico were further developed in Fracastoro’s prose treatise on syphilis, written in 1553 but not published until 1939, which served as preparation for the subsequent formulation of the Fracastorian doctrine of contagion. Some authors consider noteworthy in De morbo Gallico not so much the illustrations of the pathological phenomena as Fracastoro’s manner, his feeling for human suffering, as exemplified in the episode of the death from syphilis of a young man from Brescia, and in the vivid description of the misfortunes that pervaded Europe, and especially Italy, in the first half of the sixteenth century. The work also provided the poet with an opportunity to celebrate the great geographical discoveries of the century.
He does not hesitate to declare in the Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), a work on astronomy in which the movements of the heavens and the celestial spheres with their orbits, the seasons, and various types of days (civil, solar, sidereal) are illustrated, and in which Fracastoro again reinstates in a place of honor the most ancient astronomical theory, the Eudoxian. Apart from the intrinsic value of the work, its attempts to solve certain problems in astronomical and terrestrial physics are interesting, as are the studies on refraction. In the course of the latter Fracastoro points out the apparent enlargement and approach of celestial objects observed through two superimposed lenses, analogous to the appearance of a body immersed in water, which varies exactly according to the quantity and density of the water itself. The discourse on experience, begun in the Homocentrica, is developed in De causis criticorum dierum libellus.
Fracastoro’s scientific thought culminates and concludes with De contagion et contagiosis morbis et curatione, which assures him a lasting place in the history of epidemiology. In it he clearly describes numerous contagious diseases, with chapters of principal interest, such as that on phthisis, whose contagion and affinity for the lungs he affirms. In the work’s most significant part Fracastoro illustrates the three means by which contagion can be spread: by simple contact, by fomites, corresponding to carriers, and at a distance, without direct contact or carriers. Fracastoro imagines that in the last case the seminarian propagate either by choosing the humors for which they have the greatest affinity or by attraction, penetrating through the seeds of contagion are in fact responsible for contagion. They are distinct imperceptible particles, composed of various elements. Spontaneously generated in the course of certain types of putrefaction, they present particular characteristics and faculties, such as that of increasing themselves, having their own motion, propagating quickly, enduring for a long time, even far from their focus of origin, exerting specific contagious activity, and dying.
In certain passages the Fracastorian seminaria seem to be like our microorganisms. Undoubtedly, the seminaria derive from Democritean atomism via the semina of Lucretius and the gnostic and Neoplatonic speculations renewed by St. Augustine and St. Bonaventura (rationes seminales); but the Fracastorian seminaria differ greatly from traditional semina. It is difficult - perhaps impossible - to establish incontrovertibly whether Fracastoro really foresaw, as some would like to belive, the existence of microbes. He seems to attribute certain vital faculties to his seminaria and to use suggestive terminology for them (such as generation, birth, and life), but in light of the state of knowledge at the time—the inability to distinguish clearly between the organic and inorganic and belief in spontaneous generation - Fracastoro could not assign to his seminaria all the typical characteristics of microorganisms
Fracastoro left works on other subjects, including botany, geology, and medicine. Among those in which the philosophical and literary content merits mention are the Fracastorius sive de anima dialogus, in which he affirms the immortality of the soul, and the short poems Alcon seu de cura canum venaticorum and Ioseph.
Fracastoro subscribed to the philosophy of atomism, and rejected appeals to hidden causes in scientific investigation.
While he was still young, Fracastoro married Elena de Clavis, by whom he had five children: four sons - Giovanni Battista, Paolo, Giulio, and Paolo Filippo, and a daughter, Isabella.