Girolamo Fracastoro: Fra medicina, filosofia e scienze della natura (review)

The collective volume reviewed here gathers twenty-one papers presented by participants—all of them Italian except for two British and one Japanese—at a conference held in Verona and Padua in 2003 concerning the life, works, and historical legacy of Girolamo Fracastoro (1476/78–1553) on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of his death. This Italian physician, philosopher, and poet studied arts and medicine at the University of Padua and died in his home city of Verona.

Fracastoro's physical absence from any university city during his career did not prevent him—with the help of his family resources, his connections with powerful patrons, and the honoraries and contacts provided by his distinguished clientele—from having an outstanding intellectual life. He was a member of several academies and a correspondent to many humanist scholars in and outside Italy, and he wrote a number of works on medicine and natural philosophy that allowed him to achieve renown during his life.

The volume contains four major thematic sections that are successively focused on Fracastoro's biography (part I: pp. 5–54, three chapters by G. M. Varanini, V. S. Gondola, and G. Ongaro); his medical and scientific works (part II: pp. 55–171, eight chapters by C. Pennuto, J. Henderson, A. Pastore, I. Mastrorosa, M. di Bono, L. Ciancio, S. Sartori, and A. Arcangeli); his philosophical works (part III: pp. 173–260, five chapters by C. Vasoli, L. Liccioli, E. Peruzzi, S. de Angelis, and H. Hirai); and his historical legacy (part IV: pp. 261–344, five chapters by G. P. Marchi, I. dal Prete, V. Nutton, G. Thiene, and G. Ferrari). The volume opens with a brief, merely protocolarian preface (pp. 1–3) by the two editors and closes with an excellent index of names (pp. 345–60, by F. Lazzarin) that should be welcomed by scholars. Given the impeccable presentation, one can object only to the failure of the publisher to list contributors to the volume.

Beyond the stereotyped and mythic image that historiography has traditionally handed down of this outstanding Italian humanist-physician, the conference organizers strove to stimulate a multidisciplinary approach to Fracastoro's multifaceted personality in order to provide a wide, updated perspective on Fracastorian studies. Although the different chapters are somewhat uneven—as so often happens in collective works—the result is reasonably satisfactory on the whole. Indeed, the collected works substantially enrich the historical knowledge about (1) Fracastoro's family background and studies in Padua; (2) the several facets of his intellectual activity that are dealt with by means of an analysis (sometimes a thorough one) of his medical, astronomical, and philosophical works within the intellectual context of the Renaissance and of the learned classical tradition to which, as a humanist scholar, he felt closely identified; and (3) the appreciation of some aspects of Fracastoro's intellectual bequest in different places in and outside Italy between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.

Yet, two additional chapters might have substantially improved the volume as a whole. A chapter focusing on Fracastoro's career after his studies in Padua—with a particular emphasis on the social and institutional context of his multifaceted intellectual activities in his later years—would have helped not only to clear up his persistent historiographical image as a lonely wise man but also to reinforce an integrated view of all his activities that are dealt with in the two central parts of the volume. Another chapter about the historiographical uses and abuses of Fracastoro would have highlighted the centrality of his figure in the positivist, disciplinary history of medicine, mostly as a result of the allegedly forerunning role that his seminaria played in germ theory...