Girolamo Fracastoro

Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1478–1553) was a physician, astronomer and poet of Verona, a friend of Pietro Bembo and a student at Padua. He is remembered both for early work on contagion and for his Latin verse.

His didactic poem Syphilis sive de morbo Gallico, in three books, appeared in 1530; it tells the story of the shepherd Syphilus, from whom the disease took its name. This edition gives Nahum Tate's English verse translation, A Poetical History of the French Disease (1686); the Latin original was published in 1530.