w, declared that people thus afflicted might easily be
taught to hear by reading, and to speak by writing; writing was associated
with speech, and speech with thought, but written characters and ideas
might be connected without the intervention of sounds.[268] This view, put
forward with all the authority of Cardan's name, would certainly rouse
fresh interest in the question, and, whether stimulated by his words or
not, an attempt to teach deaf mutes was made by Pedro de Ponce, a Spanish
Dominican, about 1560. But it would not be permissible to claim for Cardan
any share in the epoch-making discoveries in Medicine. Galen as an
experimental physiologist had brought diagnosis to a level unattained
before. His methods had been abandoned by his successors, and practice had
in consequence suffered deterioration, but Cardan, studying under the
revived Galenism, called into life by the teaching of Vesalius, went to
deal with his cures under conditions more favourable than those offered by
any previous period of the world's history. His cure of Archbishop
Hamilton's asthma, over which Cassanate and the other doctors had failed,
was due to a more careful diagnosis and a more judicious application of
existing rules, rather than to the working of any new discoveries of his
own. Viewed as a soldier in the service of Hygeia, how transient and
slender is the fame of Cardan compared with that of Linacre, Vesalius, or
Harvey! Were his claims to immortality to rest entirely on his
contribution to Medicine, his name would have gone down to oblivion along
with that of Cavenago, Camutio, Della Croce, and the multitude of jealous
rivals who, according to his account, were ever plotting his downfall. But
it was rescued from this fate by his excellence as a mathematician, by the
interest clinging to his personality, by the enormous range of his
learning, by his picturesque reputation as a dreamer of dreams, and a
searcher into the secrets of the hidden world. In an age when books were
few and ill-composed, his works became widely popular; because, although
he dealt with abstruse subjects, he wrote--as even Naude admits--in a
passably good style, and handled his subject with a lightness of touch
which was then very rare. This was the reason why men went on reading him
long after his works had ceased to have any scientific value; which
induced writers like Burton and Sir Thomas Browne to embroider their pages
freely with quotations from his works,