Girolamo Fracastoro Research Articles

Contagious Vibrations: Sympathetic Resonance as a Model for Disease Transmission in the Writings of Ficino, Fracastoro, and Cardano.

Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or "sympathetic vibration" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.

The vernacularization of Paduan medicine and philosophy in the seventeenth century: Troilo Lancetta's Raccolta medica, et astrologica

AbstractIn 1645 Troilo Lancetta saw to the publication of a compilation of texts, Raccolta medica, et astrologica, under the anagrammatic and implausible pseudonym Lootri Nacattel. Most of these texts were translations into the Italian vernacular. They include writings by Girolamo Cardano; Hippocrates; Aristotle, and his commentators; Girolamo Fracastoro; Lancetta’s teacher, the philosopher Cesare Cremonini; and a handful of ancient Greek and Latin historians, in addition to excerpts from Lancetta’s medical writings. The presentation of the selected texts advances a set of polemics against the practice of bloodletting as a cure for fevers and against astrology, especially its use in medicine. The collection employs a range of authorities both classical and recent to bring anti‐Galenic and anti‐astrological teachings, already present in the University of Padua, to a broader readership. This transfer reinforced Lancetta’s identity as an erudite expert in philosophy and in medicine, an identity that he cultivated in other publishing endeavors, which included Latin editions of Cremonini’s psychological and dialectical writings. Lancetta’s Raccolta reflects a sophisticated employment of medical humanism, which used Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts to undermine interpretations of Galen and promoted Cremonini’s teachings about Meteorology as part of arguments about the subalternation of medicine to philosophy, the vanity of astrology, and the denial of the predictive power of prodigious meteorological phenomena.

Heavenly Animation as the Foundation for Fracastoro’s Homocentrism: Aristotelian-Platonic Eclecticism beyond the School of Padua

This essay deals with Girolamo Fracastoro’s ensouled cosmology. His Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), an astronomy of concentric spheres, was discussed by the Padua School of Aristotelians. Sinc...

Conhecimento histórico e tradução: notas para um estudo do De Contagione (1546), de Girolamo Fracastoro

The fight against diseases and other forms of physical illnesses, often incomprehensible and inevitable, is intertwined with the history of humanity itself. Since the first civilizations, all the knowledge acquired was also transmitted through translation. This study focuses on the intersection between translation, historical knowledge, pandemic and “normal”, aims to bring the experience of the doctor, poet, astronomer and philosopher Girolamo Fracastoro (Verona, 1476/1478 – Incaffi, 1553), with the purpose of discussing some notes on his worldview regarding specifically the contagion of diseases, present in book I of his treatise De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione [On contagion, contagious diseases and their treatment], published in Italy in 1546 and considered the author’s most celebrated work, the product of his maturity, which gave him the title of father of modern pathology. Although there is still the influence of medicine from previous periods, in the century of Fracastoro there are also notable developments in studies on the human body, which was beginning to be better understood because of the anatomical studies resulting from the dissection of cadavers. it is important to consider that, according to humanistic knowledge, being a doctor also implies being a philosopher, that is, seeking knowledge of the phenomena not in metaphysics, nor in generalities, but in the observation of the natural environment. In the first part, the text is contextualized, includes biographical elements of the author and the medical knowledge of the period, and in the second part Fracastoro’s main ideas about the contagion of diseases are presented. Finally, some considerations are made about historical knowledge, translation and the history of medicine and diseases, thought at the specific moment of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic.

Management of whiplash-associated disorder in the Italian emergency department: the feasibility of an evidence-based continuous professional development course provided by physiotherapists

Purpose The management of whiplash and associated disorders (WAD) in the Italian Health System is still empirical and influenced by a single professional’s expertise. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to describe a structured management changes in an Italian emergency department (ED) after an evidence based continuous professional development (CPD) course. Methods A CPD course was organized by Orthopedic Manipulative Physical Therapists (OMPT) for personnel of ED in the hospital Girolamo Fracastoro (San Bonifacio, Verona, Italy), based on latest scientific evidence. Data regarding the number of X-Rays, computed tomography (CT) scan, orthopaedic referrals, neck collars and WAD IV (i.e., severe diagnosis) before and after the course were compared. Results 3066 cases of WAD have been analyzed in 2016 and 2185 in 2017/2018. The number of X-Rays dropped down from 15.1% to 13.5%; the CT scans increased from 1.3% to 1.9%; the WAD IV diagnosis increased from 0.7% to 1.6%; the orthopaedic referrals dropped from 1.5% to 1.1%; the collars prescription dropped from 8.8% to 2.5%. Conclusion An updated framework increased the efficiency of ED’s maintaining the same level of safety (i.e., WAD IV diagnosis). Given that, it can also be argued that, in line with other countries, the implementation of an OMPT role within the ED multidisciplinary team is advised also in Italy. Implications for rehabilitation Physiotherapists were commissioned to organize a management change of patients in an Italian Emergency Department clinical setting for the management of whiplash; Guidelines and other appropriate clinical rules facilitate the delivery of an evidence-based and more appropriate management and care plan; An inter-disciplinary continuous professional development course has the potential to positively influence patients’ journey and to optimize the use of departmental resources; The involvement of other health professionals (e.g., Physiotherapists) within the Italian Emergency Department organizational chart might lead to further improvement of service provided.

Some Remarks on Renaissance Mythophilia. The Medical Poetics of Wonder: Girolamo Fracastoro and His Thought World (Appendix Galeotto Marzio, De doctrina promiscua [ante 1490, princeps 1548

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy.

Girolamo Fracastoro and the Origin of the Etymology of Syphilis

In 1530, Girolamo Fracastoro, an illustrious Italian physician and poet, published a book about a disease that was then known as the “French disease”, which he named syphilis. Fracastoro’s book, Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus, was written as a poem in hexameters verses, using figures from Greek mythology that provided facts about the Spanish discovery of the New World in 1492. A thorough literature review of the historical facts and mythological figures mentioned in Fracastoro’s book enabled us to complete an in-depth analysis of the poem and understand some its smallest details. Hence, we propose a new hypothesis that the origin of the term Syphilis is based on the name Sypilus as well as the appearance of people who suffer from the disease.

Syphilologies: Fracastoro's Cure and the Creation of Immunopoetics

Renaissance poet and physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) coined the neologism “syphilis” in the first poem that fictionalizes Columbus's voyage to the New World. Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus (1530) captures, as this article shows, the bonds among poetic, philological, and medical discoveries as an unprecedented inquiry into the emerging discipline of immunology. A unique hinge between poetics and medicine as well as between ancient and modern languages, the poem takes the shape of a powerful philological intervention that is here called immunopoetics. An immunopoetic look at Syphilis not only underscores Fracastoro's crucial role in the history of immunitas, a juridical term that acquired, from the Renaissance on, an increasingly medical connotation and meaning. It also offers a new etymology for the word syphilis, which has hitherto remained obscure.

Effluvia, Action at a Distance, and the Challenge of the Third Causal Model

In the early modern age, two causal models are clearly identifiable: action at a distance—a typical Renaissance paradigm, widespread among thinkers involved in natural magic and seventeenth-century Neoplatonists—and action by contact, on which both the Aristotelians (including the Jesuits) and the Cartesians agreed. Pierre Gassendi too seems to endorse the motto: ‘Nihil agit in distans nisi prius agit in medium’ [Nothing acts at a distance unless it acts through a medium]. In this essay, it will be shown that a third causal model exists, according to which material bodies are surrounded by ‘atmospheres’ of effluvia or qualities, which spread within a circumscribed ‘sphere of activity’, whose extension is peculiar to each body. In particular, it will be shown: (1) what the third causal model was like, from an ontological point of view, that is, how it centred on the concepts of effluvium and spiritus, or qualitas; (2) what this model was like, from a gnoseological point of view; (3) how it was theorized by three physicians—Girolamo Fracastoro, Daniel Sennert, and Sylvester Rattray; it stood on Gassendi’s qualitative corpuscularianism, and was exemplarily utilized by Robert Boyle.

Hieronymi Fracastorii: the Italian scientist who described the "French disease".

Girolamo Fracastoro was a true Italian Renaissance man: he excelled in literature, poetry, music, geography, geology, philosophy, astronomy and, of course, medicine to the point that made Charles-Edward Armory Winslow define him as "a peak unequaled by anyone between Hippocrates and Pasteur". In 1521 Fracastoro wrote the poem "Syphilis Sive de Morbo Gallico" in which was established the use of the term "syphilis" for this terrible and inexplicably transmitted disease, often referred to as "French disease" by the people of the time and by Fracastoro himself.

SU ALCUNE CINQUECENTINE SCIENTIFICHE DELLA BIBLIOTECA DELL’ISTITUTO LOMBARDO

We introduce some of the 96 books of scientific content, published in the 16th century and belonging to the Istituto Lombardo library. We chose some books in the field of the “natural sciences” both for iconographic peculiarities and for the original content. The library owns the first edition of the anatomy treatise of Andrea Vesalio. The medical books of Jean Francois Fernel, Antonio Fracanzani, Girolamo Fracastoro, the botanical treatise of Pier Andrea Mattioli and the geographical treatise of Giovan Battista Ramusio although in further edition are of great interest in order to evaluate the state of the art and the evolutionary steps of the science. Some books are rather rare and precious and deserve to be accurately exploited. Also the texts should be worthy of a critical investigation, overcoming the linguistic difficulties, both for the latin and for italian texts.

La piccolezza dei corpicelli: O conceito de doença epidêmica e contagiosa segundo Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro

In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese physician Estevao Rodrigues de Castro (1559-1638) proposed an innovative understanding of epidemic and contagious diseases based upon a brand new philosophy of nature. His conception of those morbid manifestations was strictly connected with his theory of the composition of things. In the book De meteoris microcosmi (1621), Estevao Rodrigues launched the principles on which he established his entire medical theory and practice, demonstrating that, in the early-modern period, philosophy was a propaedeutic discipline to medical thought. His theory consists by and large of a synthesis of pneumatic and atomist philosophies. Those principles were expanded in the books Compendio (1630) and Il curioso (1631), written and published at the same time of the outbreak of a plague in northern Italy, in 1630-33, with the purpose of defining what should be conceived as a universal disease (i.e. epidemic). His theory was considered an alternative to the one suggested, few decades earlier, by Girolamo Fracastoro in his De contagione (1546). Although influenced by many elements of Lucretian philosophy, Fracastoro’s proposal explained the mechanism of contagion through the use of an Empedoclean notion of sympathy.Keywords: medical thought, theories of diseases, early-modern medicine.

A Scholarly Intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written by Giovanni Battista Amico and Girolamo Fracastoro at Padua a few decades later. He also knew about theories pioneered by the Damascene Ibn al-Shāţir (d. 1375) that strongly resemble portions of Copernicus's work. Next, the article turns to concrete evidence showing that Galeano was part of a network of Jewish scholars who did have contact with Christian scholars in Europe. The essay concludes that, while it is impossible to prove that Galeano had direct contact with Copernicus, he most likely had contact with some European astronomer(s) in the Veneto.

Eponyms in dermatology literature linked to genital skin disorders

There are numerous eponymous systemic diseases which may affect genital skin or sexual organs in both genders. For example Behcet disease which is characterized by relapsing oral aphthae, genital ulcers and iritis. This disease is named after Hulusi Behcet [1] (1889–1948), (Fig. 1), the Turkish dermatologist and scientist who first recognized the syndrome. This disease also called „Adamantiades’ syndrome” or „Adamandiades-Behcet syndrome”, for the work done by Benediktos Adamantiades. Benediktos Adamantiades (1875-1962), (Fig. 2) was a Greek ophthalmologist [2]. Another example of systemic disease with genital involvement is Reiter syndrome which is recently called reactive arthritis. This syndrome is characterized by arthritis, urethritis, and conjunctivitis. It is named after German physician Hans Reiter [3] (18811969), (Fig. 3). However, the name „Reiter’s syndrome”, has become unpopular in the past decade as Reiter’s history of Nazi party membership, forced human experimentation in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and subsequent prosecution in Nuremberg as a war criminal, have come to light. One more example is syphilis. In 1530, the name „syphilis” was first used by the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro [4] (1478-1553), as the title of his Latin poem in dactylic hexameter describing the ravages of the disease in Italy. In his 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 now know the disease from the legend of a shepherd called Syphilus who had purportedly gotten the illness as a punishment for defying the gods. In Table I [5-20], however, we highlighted in particular to eponymous conditions which are primarily a disorders of genital area. EPONYMS IN DERMATOLOGY LITERATURE LINKED TO GENITAL SKIN DISORDERS

Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England by John Henry (review)

Reviewed by: Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England by John Henry Leen Spruit Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England. By John Henry. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xii, 328. $170.00. ISBN 978-1-4094-4458-9.) The essays collected in this book focus on a central issue in the history of early-modern science: the rise of mechanical philosophy. New philosophers and scientists such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes claimed that physics could be confined to kinematics—the motions of bodies and the interactions arising from their motions were all that was required to explain any set of circumstances. For many authors, however, a strictly mechanicist kinematics seemed unworkable. Inspired by ideas derived from theological, magical, and alchemical traditions, many physicists, neo-Platonic philosophers, chemists, and physicians held that any physical body, or matter in general, was endowed with “active principles.” The animate nature of the Earth in William Gilbert’s De magnete, Robert Boyle’s “cosmical qualities,” and Isaac Newton’s action at a distance are cases in point. Until recently, efforts to trace the intellectual origins of Newton’s concept of active principles concentrated either on the influence of alchemy or on that of Cambridge Platonism. However, it was not Newton who reintroduced occult qualities into natural philosophy. Several exponents of English mechanical philosophy before him entertained the possibility of unexplained active principles in matter. In the present volume, John Henry reconstructs a highly interesting [End Page 370] “prehistory” of Newton’s natural philosophy. Walter Warner (1570–1642/43), who arrived at his mechanical philosophy by blending elements from medieval and Renaissance neo-Platonism with ideas from Thomas Harriot and Galileo, held that all bodies possess an efficient power or virtue. Walter Charleton, following his mentor Pierre Gassendi, argued that the atoms at their creation by God are endowed with “internal energy.” Francis Glisson (Regius professor of physics at Cambridge) wrote an entire treatise on the “energetic nature of substance.” Also, Boyle did not subscribe to a strictly mechanicist account of physics, as he acknowledged the need of active principles, and assumed the existence of “aerious, etherial, luminous” spirits in all mixed bodies. Robert Hooke used inherent vibrations of matter to explain light and gravity. Thus, Newton’s introduction of active principles in matter cannot be seen as his major philosophical innovation, as has been usually assumed in historical studies. However, Newton vigorously rejected Leibniz’s objection that gravity was an occult quality. Active principles are manifest; only their causes are occult. The author further develops his central claim in essays devoted to Henry More, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. He shows that the differences between More and Boyle—apparently allies brought together by common interest in Cartesianism and the use of mechanical philosophy—were crucial, extending from their epistemological views to their beliefs about the nature of the world and of God. Hooke’s matter theory cannot be seen as simply mechanicist: his defense of the magician John Dee, written in 1690 toward the end of his career, shows a real concern for the importance of natural magic in the “improving of natural knowledge.“ A close reading of Newton’s frequently quoted letters to Richard Bentley, apparently excluding the possibility of action at a distance, shows that Newton’s pronouncements upon gravitational attraction are consistent with the view that he believed gravity to be a super-added inherent property of bodies that was capable of acting at a distance. In the final essay, the author argues that the leading figures in the magical tradition (including Girolamo Cardano, Girolamo Fracastoro, Giovan Battista Della Porta, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon) turned to the occult not because they were fools with an occult mentality, but because occult traditions seemed to offer a source of help to find solutions to problems that the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions could not resolve. With this collection, Henry offers a surprising and innovative perspective on the intellectual history of early-modern Europe with particular attention to the impact of theology and Christian faith on philosophical and scientific views of natural reality. Most of the authors discussed here assumed that God endowed...

Approaches to the Critical Days in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thinkers

Galen’s astrological doctrine of the critical days, as found in his De diebus decretoriis (Critical Days), Book III, was at the center of a long discussion in the Latin West about the relationship between astrology and medicine. The main problem was that Galen’s views could not be made to square with the prevailing cosmology, which derived both from Aristotle and Abū Maʿshar. The views of selected Latin thinkers concerning the critical days, from Pietro d’Abano, down through Girolamo Cardano, are considered in the context of a fourfold scheme that aims to classify the main approaches to the critical days. The criticisms of Pico della Mirandola are discussed, as well as two kinds of responses to him: the progressive views of Giovanni Mainardi and Girolamo Fracastoro, as well as the conservative views of Thomas Bodier and Girolamo Cardano.

¿Quién las vio primero?

From the theory of Girolamo Fracastoro in 1530, suggesting the participation of invisible seeds in the contagion of some diseases, to the universal genius Athanasius Kircher, who saw little worms in the blood of patients suffering from plague in 1659 and the final discovery of Anthony Van Leeuwenhoek in 1674, the existence of bacteria was surely in the mind of a few investigators. Kirchner, who seems to be the winner of this race, did not give any special meaning to his observations. Leeuwenhoek, instead, was deeply concerned about the importance of his discovery in the field of biology, but was unable to establish a link between these animalcula and human epidemic diseases.

Girolamo Fracastoro y la invención de la sífilis

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.

O encontro de Fracastoro com Descartes: reflexão sobre a temporalidade do método

O objetivo é o de demonstrar a importância do método na prática cientifica a partir da emergência da ciência moderna e seu modelo de racionalidade. Trata-se de uma reflexão filosófica, uma aproximação imaginária por cartas, entre Fracastoro e Descartes, estas fundamentadas em bibliografias encontradas no LILACS, SciELO e buscador Google. Os autores utilizaram a descrição por meio de cartas de um contato fictício entre Girolamo Fracastoro e René Descartes. O primeiro, a partir de suas obras Syphilis Sive Morbus Gallicus e De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione; o segundo com o Discurso do Método, utilizado como modelo da ciência moderna e Regras para a Direção do Espírito. A aproximação imaginada pelos autores, entre Fracastoro e Descartes revela que o método proposto por Descartes, se houvesse sido utilizado pelo cientista italiano, abriria novas possibilidades de visibilidade e ressonância de sua obra.

Julius Caesar Scaliger on Corpuscles and the Vacuum

This paper investigates the relationship between some corpuscularian and Aristotelian strands that run through the thought of the sixteenth-century philosopher and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger. Scaliger often uses the concepts of corpuscles, pores, and vacuum. At the same time, he also describes mixture as involving the fusion of particles into a continuous body. The paper explores how Scaliger’s combination of corpuscularian and non-corpuscularian views is shaped, in substantial aspects, by his response to the views on corpuscles and the vacuum in the work of his contemporary, Girolamo Fracastoro. Fracastoro frequently appears in Scaliger’s work as an opponent against whom numerous objections are directed. However, if one follows up Scaliger’s references, it soon becomes clear that Scaliger also shares some of Fracastoro’s views. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro suggests corpuscularian explanations of phenomena such as water rising in lime while at the same time ascribing some non-corpuscularian properties to his natural minima. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro maintains that there is no vacuum devoid of bodies since places cannot exist independently of bodies (although their opinions diverge regarding how exactly the relevant dependency relation might be explicated). Finally, like Scaliger, Fracastoro connects a continuum view of mixture with a theory of natural minima.