200 JEROME CARDAN. 



life, the house he occupied belonged to his mother, who 

 lived with him; it was a house near the church of St. 

 Michael. He earned very little indeed as a physician, 

 but something as an almanac-maker something by the 

 sale of astrological opinions; a little help he had occasion- 

 ally from his friend Archinto, and a friend who be- 

 longed to the household probably paid her way in it as 

 a lodger 1 . With these resources and the Plat lecture- 

 ship he kept house as he could. There was the resource 

 also of the gambling-table. 



Though the Milanese College of Physicians so far 

 honoured the recommendations made in favour of Cardan, 

 that already in the year 1541 we find him in office as its 

 rector 2 , it does not appear that Jerome troubled himself 

 much to acquire a social standing that consisted with his 

 newly-acquired privileges. In that year, 1541, he was 

 scarcely practising at all ; his energies were all spent upon 

 Greek and gambling. Neither in that year, nor in the 

 year preceding, had he worked much with his pen. In 

 1540 he had found leisure as an author for no more than 

 the correction of his previous books. In 1541 he wrote 



1 De VitaPropria, cap. xxv. p. 95, for the preceding. 



3 He states the fact incidentally in the history of a case attended by 

 him in that year. De Vit. Prop. cap. xxx. The servant of a Genoese 

 colonel came from Switzerland, where he had slept between two men 

 who subsequently died of plague, and had himself taken the infection. 

 Cardan found him not dead, but apparently so, and the colonel urged 

 that he should at once be carried to the dead-house. Cardan would 

 not permit that. The man recovered. 



