Girolamo Fracastoro

Girolamo Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet and scholar of the Republic of Venice who became a professor at the University of Padua in his teens and later served as physician to the Council of Trent. In his 1546 treatise De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis he proposed that epidemic diseases were spread by tiny, transferable particles capable of passing between people by direct contact, by contact with contaminated objects he termed fomites, or across a distance without contact at all, a framework historians regard as an early forerunner of germ theory. He is also remembered for his 1530 Latin poem Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus, whose afflicted shepherd protagonist gave the disease syphilis its modern name, and for descriptions of typhus and of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.