rs, he was to walk some
time in the shade at an early hour, and, discussing the time for the
fullest meal, Cardan remarks that established habits as to this point
are not to be lightly considered. His directions as to diet are many,
reasonable, and careful. His patient, once stout, had become perilously
thin. Turtle-soup and snail-broth would help him. Cardan insisted also
on the sternest rules as to hours of work, need for complete rest, daily
exercise, and was lucky enough to restore his patient to health and
vigor. The great churchman was grateful, and seems to have well
understood the unusual mental qualities of his physician. Nothing on the
whole could be better than the advice Cardan gave, and the story is well
worth reading as an illustration of the way in which a man of genius
rises above the level of the routine of his day.

I might go farther back in time, and show by examples that the great
fathers of medicine have usually possessed a like capacity, and learned
much from experience of that which, emphasized by larger use and
explained by scientific knowledge, has found its way into the text-books
of our own day and become common property.

It appears to me from a large mental survey of the gains of my
profession, that the English have above all other races contributed the
most towards enforcing the fact that on the whole dietetics, what a man
shall eat and drink, and also how he shall live as to rest, exercise,
and work, are more valuable than drugs, and do not exclude their use.[1]

[Footnote 1: By this I mean that the physician, if forced to choose
between absolute control of the air, diet, exercise, work, and general
habits of a patient, and use of drugs without these, would choose the
former, and yet there are cases where this decision would be a
death-warrant to the patient.]

The active physician has usually little time nowadays to give to the
older books, but it is still a valuable lesson in common sense to read,
not so much the generalizations as the cases of Whytt, Willis, Sydenham,
and others. Nearer our own day, Sir John Forbes, Bigelow, and Flint
taught us the great lesson that many diseases are self-limited, and need
only the great physician, Time, and reasonable dietetic care to get well
without other aid.

There is a popular belief that we have learned this from homoeopathy,
for the homoeopath, without knowing it, made for us on this matter ample
experiments, and was as confident he was gi