MILAN OFFER FROM THE DUKE OF MANTUA. 155 



but the plague raged so much in the place, that he would 

 probably himself have been one of its victims; having 

 looked over the ground, therefore, he prudently with- 

 drew. At the same time he had thoughts of a hundred 

 crowns a year at Bassano, whither his friends advised 

 him not to go. In those days of his poverty Cesare 

 Rincio, a leading Milanese physician, thought it no 

 shame to recommend that he should settle in a village 

 of the district of Novara, fifty miles from Milan, on a 

 stipend of twelve crowns a year! Salaried physicians, 

 settled thus in the plague-smitten and impoverished 

 Italian towns and villages, fulfilled functions similar to 

 those belonging now in England to an union surgeon, 

 and their services were as inadequately recompensed. 

 Cardan names two physicians, one of them at Gallarate, 

 who married upon incomes of twenty gold crowns, hoping 

 to perpetuate their families. He doubts whether either 

 of the two would be disposed to marry twice. Later in 

 his own life, when he was thirty-seven years old, and still 

 struggling in Milan, he was a rejected applicant for the 

 office of medical attendant on the hospital of St. Ambrose, 

 which would yield a yearly profit of between seven and 

 eight gold crowns 1 . His condition was much changed, 



1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxxiii. He himself claims credit for the 

 next fact in balancing his own account of vice and virtue. Others 

 observed upon it. An example of such an opinion from without will 

 occur in the course of the present chapter. 



