stition of the day respecting their value as remedies in disease ; 

 he regarded the sapphire as efficacious in ague, gout and 

 nose-bleeding, the topaz as a cure for lunacy, the cornelian 

 as mitigating the "heat of the mind and qualifying malice," 

 and doubtless prescribed many a dose of lapis lazuli for the 

 melancholia to which Rudolph was subject. Pieces of blood- 

 red jasper were highly prized for their power of stopping 

 hemorrhages, and Boethius relates how he cured a maid in 

 Prague of a hemorrhage of six years standing (for which she 

 had often been bled), by merely hanging a jasper around her 

 neck. If she neglected to wear the stone the hemorrhage 

 would return, and this continued to be the case for many 

 months until the disease eventually left her. 



Dr. Christopher Guarinonius died in September 1601, and 

 Gottfried Steegius, the physician of Bishop Julius of Wiirz- 

 burg, was invited to the imperial court ; he was distinguished 

 for being one of the first to write in praise of the mineral 

 waters of Kissingen ; Rudolph became much attached to him 

 and had his portrait engraved on copper by the court artist 

 Gilles Sadeler. 



The physicians connected with the court received large 

 salaries at a time when the profession was but poorly re- 

 compensed; dressed in their long, velvet-trimmed, silken 

 doctor's robes, and in fur pelisses, they commanded great 

 respect which was enhanced by their air of mystery and 

 pompous assumption of secret learning. Outside of the court 

 officials their practice was chiefly among noblemen, rich 

 merchants and burgesses of Prague, while the common people 

 resorted to vagabond charlatans, priests, barbers, itinerant 

 drug-peddlers and hangmen (!), or, from economical motives 

 they depended upon appeals to the saints. The prodigious 

 army of quack-doctors, and the mischief they wrought, led 

 to the adoption of an ordinance in the city of Nuremberg 



100 



