100 JEROME CARDAN. 



charge, and enforced with all his might a code of prac- 

 tice that became a noble calling. To the end of the 

 world, physicians will appreciate their fine-hearted old 

 father, and be proud to* think themselves the children of 

 Hippocrates. But Galen was a man of smaller stature, 

 living at a time when it was not so easy to be noble. 

 He was physician to five Roman emperors, and one of 

 them was Commodus. He commented upon Hippocrates, 

 and wrote much ; not in the clear, royal style, but with 

 diffuseness. Like Cardan, Galen had a passionate mother; 

 like Cardan, he was persecuted, for he could with diffi- 

 culty keep his ground in Rome 'against the sects in 

 medicine whose theories he laboured to demolish; and 

 the parallel holds good, though Galen became great 

 in his day, and was sought by kings. Like Cardan, 

 again, Galen was deficient in personal courage, and su- 

 perstitious, having much belief in dreams and omens. 

 Galen and Cardan were both boasters, and both men 

 who really rose above the level of the intellect around 

 them. Galen fought against the mere scholastic sects 

 into which the doctors had degenerated and divided, the 

 dogmatics, the empirics, the methodics, the episynthetics, 

 the pneumatics, the eclectics, and especially attacked 

 them in a lost book, of which the title is preserved, De 

 Empiricorum Contradictis, the Differings of the Em- 

 pirics. Cardan found the physicians in his day straying 



