La piccolezza dei corpicelli: The concept of Epidemic and Contagious disease according to Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese physician Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro (1559-1638) proposed an innovative understanding of epidemic and contagious diseases based upon a brand new philosophy of nature. His conception of those morbid manifestations was strictly connected with his theory of the composition of things. In the book De meteoris microcosmi (1621), Estevão Rodrigues launched the principles on which he established his entire medical theory and practice, demonstrating that, in the early-modern period, philosophy was a propaedeutic discipline to medical thought. His theory consists by and large of a synthesis of pneumatic and atomist philosophies. Those principles were expanded in the books Compendio (1630) and Il curioso (1631), written and published at the same time of the outbreak of a plague in northern Italy, in 1630-33, with the purpose of defining what should be conceived as a universal disease (i.e. epidemic). His theory was considered an alternative to the one suggested, few decades earlier, by Girolamo Fracastoro in his De contagione (1546). Although influenced by many elements of Lucretian philosophy, Fracastoro’s proposal explained the mechanism of contagion through the use of an Empedoclean notion of sympathy.

Keywords: medical thought, theories of diseases, early-modern medicine.