The Monumento a Fracastoro, dedicated to Girolamo Fracastoro, is balanced on an arch in Piazza dei Signori just behind the monument to Dante. He was a well known doctor and man of letters from Verona, and is considered to be one of the first exponents of modern pathology. He also put forward the theory of contagion based on germs and hypothesized the causes and means of infection. Perhaps his most famous work was a poem dedicated to syphilis that he christens the French Plague, for which he proscribed a cure of guaiacum and mercury.