the year. Gian Battista had now completed his medical
course, so there was now no reason why he should continue to live
permanently at Pavia. Moreover at this juncture he seems to have been
strongly moved to augment the fame which he had already won in Mathematics
and Medicine by some great literary achievement, and he worked diligently
with this object in view.[135]

At the beginning of November 1551, a letter came to him from
Cassanate,[136] a Franco-Spanish physician, who was at that time in
attendance upon the Archbishop of St. Andrews, requesting him to make the
journey to Paris, and there to meet the Archbishop, who was suffering from
an affection of the lungs. The fame of Cardan as a physician had spread as
far as Scotland, and the Archbishop had set his heart on consulting him.
Cassanate's letter is of prodigious length. After a diffuse exordium he
proceeds to praise in somewhat fulsome terms the _De Libris Propriis_ and
the treatises _De Sapientia_[137] and _De Consolatione_, which had been
given to him by a friend when he was studying at Toulouse in 1549. He had
just read the _De Subtilitate_, and was inflamed with desire to become
acquainted with everything which Cardan had ever written. But what struck
Cassanate more than anything was a passage in the _De Sapientia_ on a
medical question, which he extracts and incorporates in his epistle.
Cardan writes there: "But if my profession itself will not give me a
living, nor open out an avenue to some other career, I must needs set my
brains to work, to find therein something unknown hitherto, for the charm
of novelty is unfailing, something which would prove of the highest
utility in a particular case. In Milan, while I was fighting the battle
against hostile prejudice, and was unable to earn enough to pay my way (so
much harder is the lot of manifest than of hidden merit, and no man is
honoured as a prophet in his own country), I brought to light much fresh
knowledge, and worked my hardest at my art, for outside my art there was
naught to be done. At last I discovered a cure for phthisis, which is also
known as Phthoe, a disease for many centuries deemed incurable, and I
healed many who are alive to this day as easily as I have cured the
_Gallicus morbus_. I also discovered a cure for intercutaneous water in
many who still survive. But in the matter of invention, Reason will be the
leader, but Experiment the Master, the stimulating cause of work in
others. If in a