Which physician wrote the 1546 work De Contagione on contagious disease?

Girolamo Fracastoro wrote the 1546 work De Contagione on contagious disease.

Fracastoro was a physician and scholar from Verona who studied and practiced in Renaissance Italy. His full title, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis, means “On Contagion and Contagious Diseases.” In it, he proposed that infections could spread through transferable “seeds” or particles, including by direct contact, indirect contact through objects, and sometimes over a distance.

This was not modern germ theory: Fracastoro did not identify bacteria or viruses, and his “seeds” could be interpreted as chemical or living entities. Nevertheless, his framework was an important intellectual predecessor to later ideas about infectious agents. He also used the term fomes for contaminated materials such as clothing or linen that could help transmit disease.

Fracastoro’s work covered more than contagion. His 1530 poem Syphilis, sive de morbo Gallico helped give syphilis its name, and his medical writings included observations on rabies and typhus. His contagion theory remained influential for centuries before nineteenth-century microbiology supplied experimental evidence for microorganisms.