FRACASTORO. Carminum Editio II.

2 volumes in 4to; 245x175mm; Contemporary binding in full stiff vellum, marbled edges. Vol. 1: LX, 204, 171, [5] pages; Vol. 2: XII, 282 [2], 139 [1, Colophon] pages. Title page printed in red and black with vignette, portrait of Fracastoro engraved in copper and initialed “GC inc.”. Headpieces, tailpieces and initials. Volpi’s printing device on the colophon of the second volume. Nice specimen, with wide margins.

Second edition, more complete than the first, of this famous collection of works by the great Veronese doctor, philosopher, astronomer, geographer and man of letters, Girolamo Fracastoro. The collection includes fragments, letters, minor writings and an Italian translation of the poem La Sifilide, L'opera di Adamo Fumano e i Numeri di Niccolò d'Arco. Girolamo Fracastoro, 1476 – 1553, born in Verona, was a doctor, philosopher, astronomer, geographer. He is considered one of the greatest doctors of all time. He was a colleague and friend of Nicolaus Copernicus. He was Professor of Logic at the University of Padua. He was the Archiatra of Pope Paul III to whom he dedicated the astronomical work Homocentrica. He can be considered the founder of modern pathology because he was the first to hypothesize and verify that infections were due to germs that had the ability to multiply in the body and infect other people through breathing or other forms of contact. These theories were reported in the work “De contagione et contagiosis morbis”. He then wrote another work "Syphilis sive demorbido gallico" that is on the "French disease" which would later be called simply syphilis. As far as astronomy is concerned, he discovered that the tails of comets always appear along the direction of the Sun but in the opposite direction to it. In 1538 he described an instrument that Galileo Galilei created years later, namely the telescope. Finally, he wrote three philosophical dialogues: Naugerius sive de Poetica, Turrius sive de Intellectione and Fracastorius sive de Anima (unfinished).