Aromatari, Joseph

, a learned Italian physician, was born at Assisi, about the year 1586. His father, who was also a physician of character, spared nothing to give him an education suitable to the profession which he wished him to follow. He began his studies at Perugia, and meant to have completed them at Montpellier, but he was sent to Padua, where he attended the logical, philosophical, and medical classes. Having obtained his doctor’s degree in his eighteenth year, he went to Venice and practised physic there for fifty years, during which he refused very advantageous offers from the duke of Mantua, the king of England, and pope Urban VIII. and died there July 16, 1660. He had collected a copious library, particularly rich in manuscripts, and cultivated general literature as well as the sciences connected with his profession, in which last he published only one tract, to be noticed hereafter. His first publication was “Riposte alle considerazion di Alessandro Tassoni, sopra le rime del Petrarca,” Padua, 1611, 8vo, to which Tassoni replied under the assumed name of Crescenzio Pepe; “Avvertimenti di Cres. Pepe a Guiseppe degli Aromatari, &c.” 1611, 8vo. Aromatari answered this by “Dialoghi di Falcidio Melampodio in riposta agli avvertimenti date sotto nome di Cres. Pepe, &c.” Venice, 1613, 8vo. But the work which has procured him most reputation was a letter on the generation of plants, addressed to Bartholomew Nanti, and printed for the first time, prefixed to his (Aromatari’s) “Disputatio de rabie contagiosa,” Venice, 1625, 4to, Francfort, 1626, 4to, and the Letter was afterwards printed among the “Epistolæ selectæ” of G. Richt, Nuremberg, 1662, 4to. It was also translated into English, and published in the Philosophical Transactions, No. CCXI, and again reprinted with Jungius’s works, in 1747, at Cobourg. His opinions on the generation of plants were admired for their ingenuity, and if his health and leisure had permitted, he intended to have prosecuted the subject more minutely. ²