Fracastoro, Girolamo

The agents responsible for these great losses of life were a complete mystery. From ancient times, people had speculated about emanations (miasmata) of disease arising from swampy places (like mist) and from corpses. This bad air or mal aria was associated with the fevers and worse conditions that were prevalent in marshy places. In 1546, the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro proposed what we should now term the germ theory of disease when he wrote in his treatise entitled De Contagione ... 

In the late 1500s, the brilliant Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro theorized that the disease of syphilis was an infection that passes firom one thing to another. According to this view, there were three main ways that the contagion could be spread 1) by close contact, 2) by fomites (contaminated objects), and 3) from a distance. 

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