xii INTRODUCTION

do not love Venice and incline to the allies, but the populace and
the country—folk all adhere to Venice . . . the allies devastate
and pillage the country in a way that cannot be described.^ At
Peschiera the Veronese handed the keys of the city to Louis, but
were told to give them to the representative of Maximilian.  For
the next eight years, the city lived under the domination of the
Germans, as Fracastorius says, without comment, in the present
treatise, when he relates the aneedote of the fur coat which car—
ried the fatal contagion of the plague to 25 Teutons.

Verona under Maximilian

In this disordered state of affairs we may suppose that he began
the praetice of medicine at Verona. At the end of 1510, his fam—
ily consisted of three sons, and a daughter Isabella who is never
mentioned by him. The city then and for years to come was
not a place where an apprehensive man, such as he proves to be,
would wish to bring up a young family. : The foreign garrison of
about 8000, Germans, Spanish and Swiss, slowly and thoroughly
sacked Verona, and spared the lives neither of the citizens nor of
one another in their quarrels over the spoils. The law courts
were closed ; the streets never cleaned; and to starve out the Ger—
mans the Venetians devastated the country—side. 'These were
much the same conditions of over—crowding within the walls of a
small town, famine and unsanitary living, that produced the
plague at Athens in the 5th century B. c., when, as Lucretius
says, ""The doctors, in silent terror, muttered under their breath?.
It is said that Fracastorius advised that the houses and streets
should be cleansed, and that the advice was disregarded.

The Plague at Verona

"The plague broke out towards the close of 1510. In Confa—
gion he says that the public authorities ought to pay more at—
tention to sanitary methods, partly in order that doctors may
more safely attend the plague—stricken, but that when the con—
tagion arises from a taint in the air, safety lies in flight.  He
accordingly retreated with his family to his villa at Incaffi and
seems to have remained there, at any rate till the plague abated
and perhaps till the end of the German occupation. : This retreat
seems to be &a desertion of his post, but it is hard to say what he
could have done had he remained at Verona without any facili—«
ties for dealing with the epidemic. However, we regret that