ertainly 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Paris, that he afterwards superseded Cassanate as the Archbishop of St.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