Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Girolamo Fracastoro

  • Girolamo Fracastoro and syphilis

    JMS Pearce Hull, England In 1924, London’s National Gallery received a bequest from the Mond family, an oil painting titled Portrait of Girolamo Fracastoro, attributed to Titian about 1528. What special attributes of a Veronese physician made him a suitable subject for the renowned artist Titian? Girolamo Fracastoro or Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553) became famous because…

  • Guaiac and “the old Guaiacum test”

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States “The old Guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain.”— A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887 So declares Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet, first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887, and then as a book in July 1888 published by Ward,…

  • Did Macbeth have syphilis?

    Eleanor J. Molloy Dublin, Ireland Introduction Syphilis was endemic in Elizabethan England and it was estimated that nearly 20% of the population of London were infected.1 The signs and symptoms were commonly known to the average person and would be potentially recognizable to the audience in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare mentions syphilis more times than any…

  • Fracastorius, the man who named syphilis

    One of the great names in medical history, Girolamo Fracastoro appears in the National Gallery painting by Titian in full regalia. We owe him the name syphilis, derived from his poem (1530) Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (“Syphilis or The French Disease”) in which a shepherd boy named Syphilus was punished by Apollo with a horrible…

  • Ramazzini and the birth of occupational medicine

    Luciano DalientoLucia Dal BiancoGabriella RomeoItaly Bernardino Ramazzini, considered to be the founder of occupational and industrial medicine, was born in 1633 in Capri, a little town in the north of Italy, known nowadays because of its ceramics. Following the important innovations of the Paduan school of anatomy (Vesalius, Fabricius d’Acquapendente, and Harvey), he spearheaded the…