INTRODUCTION XXi

dence for the tradition that Marguerite invited Fracastorius
to her court as a reward for this poem, and offered him a golden
erown; the invitation, if given, was refused. Still less trust—
worthy is the statement of some biographers that Paul III
appointed him his physician.': Mencke says that he went to
France, Rteginae causa, "^on account of the Queen," to consult
with Fernelius on the sterility of Catherine de' Medici, who
married Henri II in 1533, but I find no proof that Fracastorius
ever left North Italy, even to visit Rome.

De Contagione

In 1546, he published the treatise Confagion, Contagious
Diseases and their Treatment, on which, as may be seen from
his letters, he had been working during the sixteen years since
the publication of SypAh:Js. As he says, he now writes "not
as a poet, but as a doctor.^  For the sake of comparison of the
two works, I have reserved for this place a brief analysis of his
poem, famous, but little read, and not easily accessible, except in
national or medical Libraries.

Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus

It has now been expanded into three Books (1300 Latin
hexameters), and he says that he is writing it on the shores of
Lake Garda.? In Book I he discusses the origins, causes and
symptoms of the malady. The theory of many of his contem—
poraries that the Spanish had brought this novel distemper from
the New World,3 where it is almost universal, he rejects, for

: In the standard work of Marini, Archiatrt Pontifici, Rome, 1784
Fracastorius is not included in the list of Papal physicians.

2See Contagion III. p. 267, where he says that he was then
younger, and had leisure, owing to the plague.

s 'The numerous contemporaries of Fraceastorius who maintained
the American origin of syphilis, e. g. his correspondent Oviedo
(1478—1557), who resided for many years after 1513 in the West
Indies, (Vol. I of his Historia General j Natural de Indias was pub—
lished in 1535), Falloppius (1564) and the Veronese Montanus, may
have depended in part on the treatise of R. Diaz de la Isla, the
Spanish physician of Barcelona, who was there when Columbus
returned from his voyage in 1493. Perhaps Fracastorius himself
borrowed the idea of the visit of Columbus to Hispaniola (Hayti),
and much else related in the poem, especially the account of the
elaborate cure by guaiac that had been devised by the natives, from