A father was at the beach with his children when the four-year-old son ran up to him, grabbed his hand, and led him to the shore, where a seagull lay dead in the sand.
"Daddy, what happened to him?" the son asked.
"He died and went to Heaven," the dad replied.
The boy thought a moment and then said, "Did God throw him back down?"
Girolamo FracastoroDied 6 Aug 1553 (born c. 1478). Italian physician, astronomer, geologist and poet who proposed a scientific germ theory for how diseases are transmitted In De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione (On Contagion, Contagious Diseases, and Their Cure, 1546), he described the spread of disease by so-called "seeds", that could be transported by air, upon clothing, by an animal or from one person to another. (He was extending Lucretius's earlier idea that everything was composed of small bits of atomic matter.) Fracastoro's ideas helped make unpopular public health measures more accepted, such as destroying animals, or thorough cleaning or burning of infected possessions during a plague. His ideas preceded the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch by more than 3 centuries.Date of death: DSB gives 6 Aug 1553; Enc. Brit. gives 8 Aug 1553. |
