time were most apt to consider with care the general
habits of their patients as to exercise and diet, and to rely less than
others on mere use of drugs. As to this matter, one learns more from
men's lives than from their books, but nowadays care as to matters of
hygiene has become in a valuable degree the common wisdom of a large
part of my profession. Surveying our vast gains, we are a little apt to
undervalue the men of older days, and no lesson is wiser than sometimes
to go back and see how the best of them thought and acted amidst the
embarrassments of imperfect knowledge.

There is a charming life by Henry Morley, of Cardan, the great Italian
physician and algebraist, which gives us in accurate detail the daily
routine of a doctor's days in the sixteenth century. In it is an account
of Cardan's professional visit in 1551 to John Hamilton, archbishop of
St. Andrew's, Scotland, and practically the ruler of that turbulent
realm. Cardan's scientific opinion as to his patient is queer enough,
but, as Morley remarks, it is probably not more amusing to us than will
be our opinion in a like case to the smiling brother of our guild who
may chance to read it at some remote future day. The physician of whom I
now write was one who already dreaded bleeding, thought less of
medicines than his fellows, and was, in fact, exceptionally acute. He
did some droll things for the sick prelate, and had reasons yet more
droll for what he did, but his practice was, as may happen on the whole,
wiser than his reasons for its use. His patient was a man once bulky,
but now thin, overworked, worried, subject to asthma, troubled with a
bad stomach, prone to eat largely of coarse food, but indisposed to
physical exercise. Cardan advised that the full, heated head, of which
his patient much complained, should be washed night and morning with hot
water in a warm room, and then subjected to a cold shower-bath. Next was
to come a thorough dry rubbing, and rest for two hours. As to his
asthma, he forbade him to subject himself to night air or rainy weather.
He must sleep on silk, not feathers, and use a dry pillow of chopped
straw or sea-weed, but by no means of feathers. He forbade suppers if
too late, and asked the reverend lord to sleep ten hours, and even to
take time from study or business and give it to bed. He was to avoid
purgatives, to breakfast lightly, and to drink slowly at intervals four
pints a day of new asses' milk. As to other matte