• DOI:10.1086/368701
• Corpus ID: 37260514

The Reception of Fracastoro's Theory of Contagion: The Seed That Fell among Thorns?

@article{Nutton1990TheRO,
  title={The Reception of Fracastoro's Theory of Contagion: The Seed That Fell among Thorns?},
  author={Vivian Nutton},
  journal={Osiris},
  year={1990},
  volume={6},
  pages={196 - 234}
}

• V. Nutton
• Published 1 January 1990
• Medicine
• Osiris

JN MANY MODERN HANDBOOKS of medical history, the medical RenaisI sance of the sixteenth century signifies the lighting of the torch of progress after the dark centuries of the Middle Ages. Anatomists and surgeons, the true devotees of experience, at last triumph over the argumentative theoreticians and jargon-ridden physicians. Due prominence is given to the introduction of new drugs from the Americas or from the laboratories of the chemical Paracelsians, but the therapies of the average learned practitioner a e dismissed as irrelevant or worse. The dead hand of Galenism is seen as stifling whatever originality here may have been among doctors, who are chided for their willingness to let tradition and book learning overcome any thoughts of innovation or belief in the supreme power of observation.1 To this general disparagement ofsixteenth-century physicians and their theories, there has been one major exception, the Veronese doctor and poet Girolamo Fracastoro (ca. 1478-1553). Fracastoro's reputation among historians of medicine rests on two works, both relating to the same theme of epidemic disease: his poem Syphilis ire morbus Gallicus, of 1530, and the prose treatise in three books, De contagione t contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione, of 1546. Within these writings, historians, particularly since the bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth century, have drawn attention to his theory of contagion, and specifically of ",seeds of disease," as an explanation for epidemic diseases such as plague or typhus. They have seen in it a prefiguration f modern germ theory and have contrasted it with the traditional etiology of miasma or bad air.2 More recently, Carlo Cipolla, in a