14 



the disease were forbidden under pain of the halter to have any deal- 

 ings with well persons, and it was ordered that the sick should be seg- 

 regated in places set aside for their reception in the Faubourg St. 

 Germain. Notwithstanding the rigor of the ordinance, many stricken 

 persons eluded the vigilance of the sanitary guards and moved about 

 in the city of Paris, thereby spreading the disease. The provost then 

 found it necessary to make public cry, warning all persons that there- 

 after pretensions of ignorance would be disregarded by the authori- 

 ties, and any individual, native or stranger, afflicted with syphilis and 

 found within the city would be summarily cast into the river and left 

 to his fate. 



Some years later there was similar trouble in the Italian part of the 

 Tyrol, trouble which so interfered with one of the most important 

 ecclesiastical gatherings of the times that Pope Paul III, by advice of 

 Fracastoro, removed the Council of Trent to Bologna. Fracastoro 

 had previously written a dignified and graceful medical poem, in 

 Latin, entitled "Syphilidis sive Morbus Gallicus," after whose hero, 

 the shepherd Syphilus, the disease received its name. 



His interest in this prevalence of syphilis influenced Fracastoro to 

 publish, in 1546, the work "De Contagionibus." The .great feature 

 of this writing is the presentation of the subject in such a catching 

 way that it took hold on the popular mind, and even had decided effect 

 in loosening the deep-rooted medical opinion of the times. The lesson 

 of contagion was taught by a number of clever similes. For example, 

 Fracastoro divides contagious diseases into three classes, namely, dis- 

 ease catching by contact, in which he compares the mode of com- 

 municability to the way in which one decayed fruit spoils another 

 perfect one; disease carried by fomites, a process likened to the per- 

 sistence of soot on a smoky wall; and disease conveyed to a distance, 

 in which manner the virus is carried just as the volatile essence of 

 garlic or of an onion is borne through space, affecting the nostrils and 

 causing the eyes to water. Fracastoro taught that the poison of dis- 

 ease consists in corpuscles, and that it affects first the minute particles 

 of the animal body. He says that this poison persists in the body, in 

 fomites, or in the air, in proportion to a kind of stickiness existing 

 between the conveying medium and the poisonous corpuscles; and 

 that woolen fabrics and the like absorb, retain, and transport con- 

 tagion with ease, because they contain interspaces to lodge the cor- 

 puscles, and are of a nature to protect the poison from the light, heat, 

 cold, air, dampness, and other conditions injurious to it. 



So we see that, with the acceptance of the views of Delia Torre, 

 Benedetti, Ficino, and Fracastoro, things were fairly in the way for a 

 beginning of quarantine on a practical basis. 



