Fracastoro, GIROLAMO

Fracastoro, GIROLAMO, an Italian physician and poet, famous for the universality of his learning, was born at Verona in 1483. At the age of nineteen he was appointed professor of Logic in the university of Padua. He afterwards practised successfully as a physician, and it was by his advice that the Council of Trent moved from Trent to Bologna to avoid the plague. Some years before his death, which occurred at Casì, near Verona, on 8th August 1553, Fracastoro abandoned medicine for letters, and became intimate with some of the leading scholars of the age. The chief of his numerous writings are: Syphilidis, sive de Morbo Gallico, Libri Tres (1530; Lond. 1720); De Vini Temperatura (1534); Homocentricorum sive de Stellis Liber (1535); and De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum (1546). His collected works appeared at Venice in 1555, and his poetical works at Padua in 1728.