Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study

by W. G. Waters

He next cites the De Consolatione to demonstrate the futility of lamentation over misfortune past or present, or indeed over any decree of fate. He bids Gian Battista reflect that he is human not a brute, a man not a woman, a Christian not a Moslem or Jew, an Italian not a barbarian, sprung from a worthy city and family, and from a father whose name by itself will prove a title to fame. His only real troubles are a weak body and infirm health—one a gift of heredity, the other aggravated by dissolute habits. It may be a vain thing for men to congratulate themselves over their happiness, but it is vainer for them to cry out for solace over past calamity. Contempt of money is foolish, but contempt of God is ten times worse. Cardan concludes this part of his letter by reciting two maxims given him by his father—one, to have daily remembrance of God and of His vast bounty, the other, to pursue with the utmost diligence any task taken in hand.

Cardan then treats the scapegrace to a string of maxims from the De Utilitate, maxims which a model son might have read, but which Gian Battista would certainly put aside unnoticed, and finishes with some serviceable practical counsel: "Keep your mind calm, go early to bed, for ours is a hot-blooded race and predisposed to suffer from stone. Take nine hours' sleep, rise at six and visit your patients, being careful to use no speech unconnected with the case before you. Avoid heating your body to perspiration; go forth on horseback, come back on foot; and on your return put on warm clothes. Drink little, break your fast on bread, dried fish, and meat, and then give four hours to study, for studies bring pleasure, relief from care, and mental riches; they are the foundations of renown, and enable a man to do his duty with credit. See your patients again; and, before you sup, take exercise in the woods and fields adjacent. Should you become over-heated or wet with rain, cast off and dry your damp clothes, and don dry ones. Sup heartily, and go to bed at eight; and when, by the brevity of the night, this is not convenient, take a corresponding rest during the day. Abstain from summer fruit, from black wine, from vain overflow of talk, from falsehood and gaming, from trusting a woman or over-indulging her, for she is a foolish animal and full of deceit. Over-fondness towards a woman will surely bring evil upon you. Bleed and purge yourself as little as possible; learn by experience of other men's faults and misfortunes; live frugally; bear yourself suavely to all men; and let study be your main end. All this and more have I set forth in the books I have named. Trust neither promises nor hopes, for these may be vain and delusive; and reckon your own only that which you hold in your hand. Farewell."

From the fact that Cardan took part in an unofficial medical conference in Paris, that he afterwards superseded Cassanate as the Archbishop of St. Andrews' physician, and did not find himself with a dozen or so quarrels on his hands, it may be assumed that he was laudably free from the jealousy attributed by tradition to his profession. This instance becomes all the more noteworthy when his natural irascibility, and the character of the learned controversy of the times comes to be considered. He does not spare his censure in remarking on the too frequent quarrels of men of letters,[255] albeit these quarrels must have lent no little gaiety to the literary world. No one who reads the account of Gian Battista's fate can doubt the sincerity of Cardan's remorse for that neglect of the boy's youthful training which helped to bring him to ruin, and the care which he bestowed upon his grandson Fazio proved that his regret was not of that sort which exhales itself in empty words. The zeal with which he threw himself into the struggle for his son's life, and his readiness to strip himself of his last coin as the fight went on, show that he was capable of warm-hearted affection, and afraid of no sacrifice in the cause of duty.

The brutal candour which Cardan used in probing the weaknesses of his own nature and in displaying them to the world, he used likewise in his dealings with others. If he detected Branda Porro or Camutio in a blunder he would inform them they were blockheads without hesitation, and plume himself afterwards on the score of his blunt honesty. Veracity was not a common virtue in those days, but Cardan laid claim to it with a display of insistence which was not, perhaps, in the best taste. Over and over again he writes that he never told a lie;[256] a contention which seems to have roused especially the bile of Naudé, and to have spurred him on to make his somewhat clumsy assault on Cardan's veracity.[257] His citation of the case of the stranger who came with the volume of Apuleius for sale, and of the miraculous gift of classic tongues, has already been referred to; but these may surely be attributed to an exaggerated activity of that particular side of Cardan's imagination which was specially prone to seize upon some figment of the brain, and some imperfectly apprehended sensation of the optic nerve, and fashion from these materials a tale of marvel. Delusions of this sort were common in reputed witches, as Reginald Scot writes—"They learne strange toongs with small industrie (as Aristotle and others affirme)."[258] The other charge preferred by Naudé as to the pretended cure of consumption, and the consequent quibbling and tergiversation, is a more valid one. It has been noted how Cardan, previous to his journey to Scotland, had posed as the discoverer of a cure for this malady. In the list of his cures successfully treated he includes several in which he restored patients suffering from blood-spitting, fever, and extreme emaciation to sound health, the most noteworthy of these being that of Girolamo Tiboldo, a sea-captain. When the sick man had risen from his bed and had become fat and healthy, Cardan deemed that the occasion justified a certain amount of self-gratulation, but the physicians, out of envy, declared that Tiboldo had never suffered from true phthisis. In his account of the case Cardan says that he, and the physicians as well, were indeed untruthful over the matter, his own falsehood having been the result of over-sanguine hope, and theirs the outcome of spiteful envy. Tiboldo died after all of chest disease, but not till five years later, and then from a chill caught through sitting in wet garments.[259] The term consumption has always been applied somewhat loosely, and Cardan probably would have been allowed the benefit of this usage if he had not, in an excess of candour, set down the workings of his mind and conscience with regard to this matter. Writing of his treatment of Archbishop Hamilton, he says: "And in truth I cured scarcely any patients of phthisic disease, though I did find a remedy for many who were suffering from similar maladies, wherefore that boast of mine, that proclamation of merit to which I had no right, worked no small profit to me, a man very little given to lying. For the people about the Archbishop, urged on by these and other considerations, persuaded him that he had no chance of regaining his health except by putting himself under my care, and that he should fly to me as his last hope."[260] It has already been noted that Cardan's claim to some past knowledge in the successful treatment of chest diseases had weight with the Archbishop and Cassanate, and the result of his visit surely proved that their confidence was not ill-placed; his boasting may have been a trifle excessive, but it was based on hope rather than achievement; and if proof can be adduced that it was not prompted by any greed of illegitimate fame or profit, it may justly be ranked as a weakness rather than as a serious offence. To these two instances of falsehood Naudé adds a third, to wit, Cardan's claim to the guidance of a familiar spirit. He refuses to let this rank as a delusion; and, urged no doubt by righteous indignation against the ills springing from kindred superstitions, he writes down as a liar rather than a dupe the man who, after mastering the whole world of science, could profess such folly.

Considering the catholicity of Cardan's achievements, and the eager spirit of inquiry he displayed in fields of learning remote from his own particular one, it is worthy of notice that he did not allow this discursive humour, which is not seldom a token of instability, to hold him back from pursuing the supreme aim of his life, that is, eminence in the art of Medicine. In his youth the threats and persuasions of his father could not induce him to take up Jurisprudence with an assured income and abandon Medicine. At Sacco, at Gallarate, and afterwards in Milan he was forced by the necessity of bread-winning to use his pen in all sorts of minor subjects that had no real fascination for him, but all his leisure was devoted to the acquisition of Medical knowledge. Prudence as well as inclination had a share in directing his energies into this channel, for a report, for which no doubt there was some warrant, was spread abroad that what skill he had lay entirely in the knowledge of Astrology; and, as this rumour operated greatly to his prejudice,[261] he resolved to perfect himself in Medicine and free his reputation from this aspersion. He had quarrelled violently with the physicians over the case of Count Borromeo's child which died, and with Borromeo himself, and, almost immediately after this, he published his book, De Astrorum Judiciis, a step which tended to identify him yet more closely with Astrology, and to raise a cry against him in Milan, which he declares to be the most scandal-mongering city in the Universe. But it is clear that in this instance scandal was not far wrong, and that Cardan himself was right in purging himself of the quasi science he ought never to have taken up.

Medicine, when Cardan began his studies, was beginning to feel the effects of the revival of Greek learning. With the restored knowledge of the language of Greece there arose a desire to investigate the storehouses of science, as well as those of literature, and the extravagant assumption of the dogmatists, and the eccentricities of the Arabic school gave additional cogency to the cry for more light. The sects which Galen had endeavoured to unite sprang into new activity within a century after his death. The Arabian physicians, acute and curious as they were, had exercised but a very transient influence upon the real progress of the art, the chief cause of their non-success being their adhesion to arbitrary and empirical tradition. At the end of the fifteenth century, Leonicinus, a professor at Ferrara, recalled the allegiance of his pupils to the authority of Hippocrates by the ability and eloquence of his teaching; and, by his translation of Galen's works into Latin, he helped still farther to confirm the ascendency of the fathers of Medicine. The Arabians, sprung from the East, the storehouse of drugs and simples, and skilled in Chemistry, were the founders of the Pharmacopœia,[262] but with this exception they did nothing to advance Medicine beyond the point where the Greeks had left it. The treatises of Haly, Avicenna, and Maimonides were little better than faint transcriptions of the writings of the great forerunners. Their teaching was random and spasmodic, whereas the system of Hippocrates was conceived in the spirit of Greek philosophy, moving on by select experience, always observant and cautious, and ascending by slow and certain steps to the generalities of Theory. Indeed the science of Medicine in the hands of Hippocrates and his school seems, more than any other, to have presented to the world a rudimentary essay, a faint foreshadowing of the great fabric of inductive process, subsequently formulated by the genius of Bacon. At various epochs Medicine had been specially stimulated by the vivifying spirit of Greek science; in the Roman school in the days of Celsus, and in the Arabian teaching likewise. Fuller acknowledgment of the authority of Greek Medicine came with the Renaissance,[263] but even this long step in advance did not immediately liberate the art from bondage. A new generation of professors arose who added fresh material to the storehouses, already overflowing, of pedantic erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any fruit of other men's labour which might not square exactly with the utterances of the founders. This attitude rendered these professors of Medicine the legitimate objects of ridicule, as soon as the leaven of the revival began to work, and the darts of satire still fly, now and then, at the same quarry. Paracelsus, disfigured as his teaching was by mysticism, the arts of the charlatan, and by his ignorant repudiation of the service of Anatomy, struck the first damaging blows at this illegitimate ascendency, by the frequent success of his empirical treatment, by the contempt he heaped upon the scholastic authorities, and by the boldness with which he assailed every thesis which they maintained. Men of more sober intellect and weighty learning soon followed in his track. Fernelius, one of the physicians Cardan met in Paris, boldly rejected what he could not approve by experience in the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and stood forth as the advocate for free inquiry, and Joubert of Montpelier, Argentier of Turin, and Botal of Asti subsequently took a similar course.

When Cardan went to study at Pavia in 1519 this tradition was unshaken. It was not until the advent of Vesalius that the doom of the ancient system was sounded. Then, when Anatomy sprang to the front as the potent ally of Medicine, the science of healing entered upon a fresh stage, but this new force did not make itself felt soon enough to seduce Cardan from the altars of the ancients to the worship of new gods. As long as he lived he was a follower of the great masters, though at the same time his admiration of the teaching of Vesalius was enthusiastic and profound. His love of truth and sound learning forbade him to give unreflecting adhesion to the precepts of any man, however eminent, and when he found that Galen was a careless commentator on Hippocrates,[264] and failed to elucidate the difficulties with which he professed to deal, he did not spare his censure.[265] In the De Subtilitate he speaks of him as "Verbosus et studio contradicendi tædulus ut alterum vix ferre queas, in reliquo gravis jactura artium posita sit, quam nostræ ætatis viri restituere conati sunt."[266] But as Galen's name is quoted as an authority on almost every page of the Consilia Medica, it may be assumed that Cardan's faith in his primary theories was unshaken. In his Commentaries on Hippocrates, Galen professes a profound respect for his master, but the two great men must be regarded as the leaders of rival schools; indeed it could hardly be otherwise, seeing how vast was the mass of knowledge which Galen added to the art during his lifetime.

Hippocrates, by denying the supernatural origin of disease, by his method of diagnosis, by the importance he attached to air and diet, by his discriminating use of drugs, and by the simplicity of his system generally, had placed Medicine on a rational basis. In the six hundred years' space which elapsed before the appearance of Galen, Medicine was broken up into many rival schools. The Dogmatici and the Empirici for many years wrangled undisturbed, but shortly after the Christian era the Methodici entered the field, to be followed later on by the Eclectici and a troop of other sects, whose wranglings, and whose very names, are now forgotten. In his History of Medicine, Dr. Bostock gives a sketch of the attitude of Galen towards the rival schools. "In his general principles he may be considered as belonging to the Dogmatic sect, for his method was to reduce all his knowledge, as acquired by the observation of facts, to general theoretical principles. These principles he indeed professed to deduce from experience and observation,[267] and we have abundant proofs of his diligence in collecting experience and his accuracy in making observations; but still, in a certain sense at least, he regards individual facts and the details of experience as of little value, unconnected with the principles which he laid down as the basis of all medical reasoning. In this fundamental point, therefore, the method pursued by Galen appears to have been directly the reverse of that which we now consider as the correct method of scientific investigation; and yet, such is the force of actual genius, that in most instances he attained the ultimate object in view, although by an indirect path. He was an admirer of Hippocrates, and always speaks of him with the most profound respect, professing to act upon his principles, and to do little more than expound his doctrines and support them by new facts and observations. Yet in reality we have few writers whose works, both as to substance and manner, are more different from each other than those of Hippocrates and Galen, the simplicity of the former being strongly contrasted with the abstruseness and refinement of the latter."

The antagonism between these two great men was not perhaps more marked than might have been expected, considering that an interval of six hundred years lay between them. However loyal he may have been to his master, Galen, with his keen, catholic, and subtle intellect, was bound to fall under the sway of Alexandrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as the pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted—unhappily for the future of science—to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates, as a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false step for which not even his great services to anatomy and physiology can altogether atone. Yet most likely it was this same error, an error which practically led to the enslavement of Medicine till the seventeenth century, which caused Cardan to regard him, and not Hippocrates, as his master. The vastness and catholicity of Galen's scheme of Medicine must have been peculiarly attractive to a man of Cardan's temper; and that Galen attempted to reconcile the incongruous in the teleological system which he devised, would not have been rated as a fault by his Milanese disciple.

Galen taught as a cardinal truth the doctrine of the Hippocratic elements, heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, and a glance at the Consilium which Cardan wrote out on Archbishop Hamilton's illness, will show how completely he was under the sway of this same teaching. The genius of Hippocrates was perhaps too sober and orderly to win his entire sympathy; the encyclopædic knowledge, the literary grace, and the more daring flights of Galen's intellect attracted him much more strongly. Hippocrates scoffed at charms and amulets, while Galen commended them, and is said to have invented the anodyne necklace which was long known and worn in England. There is no need to specify which of the masters Cardan would swear by in this matter. The choice which Cardan made, albeit it was exactly what might have been anticipated, was in every respect an unfortunate one. He put himself under a master whose teaching could have no other effect than to accentuate the failings of the pupil, whereas had he let his mind come under the more regular discipline of Hippocrates' method, it is almost certain that the mass of his work, now shut in dusty folios which stand undisturbed on the shelves for decade after decade, would have been immeasurably more fruitful of good. With all his industry in collecting, and his care in verifying, his medical work remains a heap of material, and nothing more valuable. Learning and science would have profited much had he put himself under the standard of the Father of Medicine, and still more if fate had sent him into being at some period after the world of letters had learned to realize the capabilities of the inductive system of Philosophy.