Abstract
Girolamo Fracastoro wrote two works on syphilis: his famous poem, in which he gave a name to the disease, and a prose treatise. From the comparison of these works, in this paper we have identified the combination of several approaches as main characteristic of his description. On the one hand Fracastoro followed the classical medical explanation that emphasized the corruption of the air in order to explain the origins of the disease. On the other hand, when referring to the forms of contagion, he stated clearly that the disease is contracted by direct contact with an infected person. It is possible then to talk of the "invention" of syphilis by Fracastoro since he combined the information empirically collected, with the renaissance medical traditional perspective.
Highlights
Girolamo Fracastoro wrote two works on syphilis: his famous poem, in which he gave a name to the disease, and a prose treatise
The Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553) has been traditionally considered as an emblematic figure in the history of medicine. His fame is greatly due to the allusion made to the existence of tiny seeds of diseases contained in his work written in 1546, De contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri tres (The three books on contagion, contagious diseases and their cure)
The well known poem “Syphilidis sive de morbo gallico libri tres” (Three books on syphilis or the French disease), he coined the name by which we know the disease from the legend of a shepherd called Syphilus who had purportedly gotten the illness as a punishment for defying the gods
Summary
Girolamo Fracastoro wrote two works on syphilis: his famous poem, in which he gave a name to the disease, and a prose treatise. From these fragments it is possible to establish that in the period of writing the poem, that is during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Fracastoro considered the corruption of the medium, which at the same time was independent of the relation with the American sufferers, as the fundamental explanatory element for the origin of the disease.
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