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PREFACE

"TThe year 1930 is the four—hundredth anniversary of the pub—
lication of the earliest medical work of Fracastorius, the poem
Syphilis siwe Morbus Gallicus. — After sixteen years of research he
published, in 1546, the vastly more important prose treatise De
Contagione, Contagiosis Morbis et eorum Curatione, of which the
present Translation is the first that has appeared in English. I
have omitted his long and irrelevant, though interesting, Intro—
duection, De Sympathia et Anf&pathia, which does not deal di—
rectly with contagion or disease, but expounds his views on the
various manifestations in Nature of the attraction and repulsion
of things.  There he defines his use of certain terms, such as Anal—
ogy, and in the main treatise often refers to his Introduction;
these references have been explained in the Notes at the end of
this volume. I have had before me the Lyons edition of the De
Contagione, 1554, but hardly any text of Fracastorius can be :
safely used without revision, and the Latin text here printed and
translated is the result of a comparison by me of the Editio Prin—
ceps, 1546, the two Lyons editions, 1550, 1554, and the Editio
Princeps of the Opera Omnia, 1555. Mere variations of spelling
have not been recorded in my textual Notes.

'The identifications of Plants, etc., attempted in my Commen—
tary are sometimes certain, sometimes merely probable or possi—
ble.  Fracastorius had before him Dioscurides, Pliny, Galen De
Simplcibus, and probably Theophrastus, as well as the botani—
cal works of his own and the preceding century, and, following
the example of Pliny in the first century ^. p., though with less
easy credulity, he often tried to transfer the plant—names that he
found in such herbals to the plants that grew in his North Italian
country—side or elsewhere in Europe; he would now accept and
now reject the conclusions of Fuchs, Ruel, and other contempo—
rary herbalists.  No doubt he was often mistaken in his identifi—
cations. A century later, Burton in his Anatomy of Melanchol,
in the Section Medicinal Physic, was less cautious in identifying
the herbs that he met with in his vast reading, with the English

It9]

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