liv INTRODUCTION

useful. 'The first complete translation of Co«»fagion is that
of L6on Meunier (1893). The Latin text at the bottom of
each page contains many errors, some of them serious, and it
cannot be used without careful revision. His translation, in
French, is clear and omits very littie but it is marred by surpris—
ing errors, some of which I haveindicated in my Notes. Meunier
has very few notes, and they are of little value; his brief Intro—
duection is good, but his Nofice sur [a vie de Fracastor is inade—
quate, and sometimes inaccurate. V. Fossel's German transla—
tion (1910) does not give the Latin text. He omits words,
sentences and whole pages of the treatise, and depends too much
on Meunier, to judge from the fact that he almost always echoes
the Frenchman'/s errors. 'There are no Notes, but the brief
Introduction is good. Riddell (1928) prefixed his English prose
translation of the poem Syph£/s by a translation of the three
chapters from Cor/agion that had appeared in the work of
Fournier. " His versions, both of the poem and the prose extracts
on syphilis are clear and almost always aeccurate, and he is more
conscientious than Fournier in that he does not impose on
Fraeastorius modern medica!l terminology. His Notes are
useful, but his Life is too brief, and does not go back to the best
sources, being derived as he frankly says, from a notice in a
Biographical Dictionary. 'There exists, so far as I know, no
translation of the De Causis Criicorum Dierum, his other
medical prose treatise, though it is the most direct attack by
Fracastorius on the theories of Galen.

An adequate Biography of Fracastorius that would do justice
to all his interests does not exist and will probably never be
written, for writers on the history of medicine know little of
his purely literary work, and those who, like Barbarani, are
thoroughly competent to give a picture of the humanism of his
century, or Mencke, who laboriously collected all the known
facts of his life, are too little interested in the epidemics that
then invaded Italy, and that were to Fracastorius himself the
most poignant events of the first half of the l6th century.  IIf,
apart from these visitations, his life seems uneventful to us, we
must remember that he lived through the most notable period
of the German Reformation, saw the art of printing become
general, and above all followed with the passionate interest of
a geographer all the marvels that were revealed to Europe by
the discovery of the New World.