Hieronymus Fracastorius: Contagion, Contagious Diseases and Their Treatment (History of Medicine Series)

Hieronymus Fracastorius; Wilmer Cave Wright

G.P. Putnam's Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1930

[History of medicine series, no. II] Near fine. Hardcover and dust jacket. Jacket clipped. Dust jacket in protective mylar cover. Good binding and cover. Clean, unmarked pages. lvii, 356 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm. 

"Four hundred years have passed since this Italian physician, of Verona, published his famous poem Syphilis, and so gave to that disease which it is universally known today. Now appears the first English translation of his more important prose treatise on the nature of Contagion, which not only supersedes the poem by a more thorough discussion of the causes and treatment of syphilis, but also deals in the same way with typhus, tuberculosis, the plague, leprosy, rabies, elephantiasis, and other contagious diseases prevalent in the 16th century. Fracastorius was the first to distinguish sharply, on the basis of his own clinical observations, the various means, direct and indirect, of transmission of communicable diseases, and the terms he invented are still in use." 

From the library Dr. Owen Hannaway. Hannaway was director of the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Johns Hopkins University. He authored numerous books and served as an editor of academic magazines in the history of science. Partial list of publications: Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (1975); Observation, Experiment, and Hypothesis in Modern Physical Science (1985); The Evolution of Technology (1989); Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1994); and The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (1996).