[Medicine and physical activity and their relatedness in history].

The authors outline how scientific and social ideas and concepts, regarding the role of physical activity in human health, have evolved throughout the last centuries,.

[P. Minonzio's ideas about contagion].

Paolo Minonzio was a physician working in a little country town near Varese in XIX century. He wrote a diary illustrating his medical experience which represents an interesting document of the spreading of bacteriological theories in a provincial context.