CASE OF JOHN HAMILTON, ARCHBISHOP. 115 



watched his cases very closely; and since, as we have 

 before seen, he knew the harm that may be done by me- 

 dicine, and had freed himself from many dangerous 

 absurdities of practice, since he also dreaded misuse of 

 the lancet, and relates candidly how in his early days 

 he lost patients by bleeding them 1 , there can be no doubt 

 that he was in his day, what he was believed to be, one 

 of the safest advisers to whom a sick man could apply for 

 help. 



Applying theory to practice, the basis of the arch- 

 bishop's cure, in as far as diet was concerned, Cardan said 

 must depend on the use of a food as much as possible cold- 

 natured and humid. The cold-natured food would resist 

 the attraction of the brain, for it is the nature chiefly of 

 warm things to exhale and to ascend. Humidity, he 

 said, would obstruct the soaking down of matter from the 

 brain through the coats of the windpipe, so compelling it 

 to descend by the main channel, whence it could be 

 coughed out during its downward passage. 



It was his opinion that the chief object of the cure by 

 medicine should be to attack the root of the disease ? 

 namely, the unhealthy temperature of the brain. With 

 that view the head should be purged, and before that was 

 done, there should, of course, come purgation of the body. 

 Purgation of the head, he explained, was to be effected 



1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxxiii. 

 I 2 



