After the early years of the epidemic, however, there are
no medical descriptions recognising a non-venereal mode of
transmission except for those that observed the manifestations of
congenital syphilis. In his prose treatise, written around the fourth
decade of the 16th century, Fracastoro wrote that the infection could
not take place at a distance or through intermediary carriers. Given the
property of the ‘seed’ of the disease, which was considered ‘not
penetrating,’ syphilis could not be transmitted through simple personto-person
nearness or touch – the contact had to be very close ‘as
when two bodies mutually touched in warmth’ which ‘mainly happens
during coitus’ [13].