Girolamo Fracastoro penned Syphilis, sive morbus Ga/lieus (Syphilis, or the French disease) in verse. In it he taught that this sexually transmitted disease was spread by" seeds" distributed by intimate contact. In later writings, he expanded this early" contagionist" theory. Besides contagion by personal contact, he described contagion by indirect contact, such as the handling or wearing of clothes, and even contagion at a distance, that is, the spread of disease by something in the air. Fracastoro was anticipating, by nearly 350 years, one of the most important turning points in biological and medical history-the consolida- Girolamo Fracastoro tion of the germ theory of disease by Louis