Felix Platter -- the founder of modern germ theory

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"Nardi, as it happens, does not mention Fracastoro. His authority (apart from Lucretius himself) is Felix Platter. Platter, in his De Febribus (1597) ... had explicitly rejected arguments for the spontaneous generation of plague and syphilis, since these could not account for the fact that these were new diseases -- if they could be spontaneously generated they would have arisen over and over again. ... He thus carefully propounds the theory that these diseases are spread by seeds or germs [in Latin: "semen" -- wrongly understood not as "germs", but as "seminal fluid" after Platter and until Bassi] ... Platter is thus a proper germ theorist, the earliest known to me" (David Wootton, 2006: Bad Medicine - Doctors doing harm since Hippocrates, p. 127). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.2.161.4 (talk) 18:54, 20 February 2011 (UTC)Reply

Foreign Exchange Student. Felix Plater's father Thomas Plater provided room and board to a student attending the University of Basel, in return, the student's father, Monsieur Catalan, a pharmacist in Montpellier provided room and board to Felix.

Diarist and Author. Much of what we know about Felix Plater is derived from the journals he kept "Beloved Son". In addition to these, he authored several books of medical academia. http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n50054102/