In Rome, he made favorable contacts and had free access to the great libraries where, with sweeping enthusiasm, he studied the classical and medical literature of the Greeks and Romans.

His studies of the attitudes of the ancients toward diet, exercise, and hygiene and the use of natural methods for the cure of disease culminated in the publication of his De Arte Gymnastica(Venice, 1569).

He and another medical professor, Girolamo Capodivacca, offered to personally treat the sick in Venice on the condition that the quarantines and other precautions put in place by the Board of Health be lifted.

The professors and their assistants traveled freely between infected and safe houses, administering treatment, to the horror of the Board of Health and officials in Padua and surrounding cities, who worried the disease would spread.

By the beginning of July, the Senate ordered Mercuriale and Capodivacca to be quarantined themselves and it was largely believed that their questionable methods were the reason for the spread of the plague, which eventually claimed 50,000 Venetians, one third of the inhabitants.

[4] However, Mercuriale salvaged his own reputation in the following years with the 1577 publication of De Pestilentia, his treatise about the plague, which had been delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Padua.

On 11 March 2009, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne hosted a colloquium given by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of Girolamo Mercuriale.