duction of the _Book of the
Great Art_. Moreover, the time in question was one of the prime epochs in
the history of the healing art. A new light had just arisen in Vesalius,
who had recently published his book, _Corporis Humani Fabrica_, and was
lecturing in divers universities on the new method of Anatomy, the actual
dissection of the human body. He went to Pavia in the course of his
travels and left traces of his visit in the form of a revived and
re-organized school of Anatomy. This fact alone would have been a
powerful attraction to Cardan, ever greedy as he was of new knowledge, but
there was another reason which probably swayed him more strongly still, to
wit, the care of his eldest son's education and training. Gian Battista
Cardano was now in his fourteenth year, and, according to the usages of
the time, old enough to make a beginning of his training in Medicine, the
profession he was destined to follow. It is not recorded whether or not he
chose this calling for himself; but, taking into account the deep and
tender affection Jerome always manifested towards his eldest son, it is
not likely that undue compulsion was used in the matter. The youth,
according to his father's description, strongly favoured in person his
grandfather Fazio.[114] He had come into the world at a time when his
parents' fortunes were at their lowest ebb, during those terrible months
spent at Gallarate,[115] and in his adolescence he bore divers physical
evidences of the ill nurture--it would be unjust to call it neglect--which
he had received. At one time he was indeed put in charge of a good nurse,
but he had to be withdrawn from her care almost immediately through her
husband's jealousy, and he was next sent to a slattern, who fed him with
old milk, and not enough of that; or more often with chewed bread. His
body was swollen and unhealthy, he suffered greatly from an attack of
fever, which ultimately left him deaf in one ear. He gave early evidence
of a fine taste in music, an inheritance from his father, and was,
according to Cardan's showing, upright and honest in his carriage, gifted
with talents which must, under happier circumstances, have placed him in
the first rank of men of learning, and in every respect a youth of the
fairest promise. The father records that he himself, though well furnished
by experience in the art of medicine, was now and again worsted by his son
in disputation, and alludes in words of pathetic regret to dive