272 JEROME CARDAN 



than expound his doctrines and support them by new 

 facts and observations. Yet in reality we have few 

 writers whose works, both as to substance and manner, 

 are more different from each other than those of Hippo- 

 crates and Galen, the simplicity of the former being 

 strongly contrasted with the abstruseness and refinement 

 of the latter." 



The antagonism between these two great men was 

 not perhaps more marked than might have been ex- 

 pected, considering that an interval of six hundred years 

 lay between them. However loyal he may have been 

 to his master, Galen, with his keen, catholic, and subtle 

 intellect, was bound to fall under the sway of Alex- 

 andrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as the 

 pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary 

 school of philosophy fascinated him; and, in his en- 

 deavour to bring Medicine out of the chaotic welter in 

 which he found it, he attempted unhappily for the 

 future of science to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism 

 then dominant in Alexandria, rather than the gradual 

 and orderly induction of Hippocrates, as a bond of union 

 between professional and scientific medicine ; a false 

 step for which not even his great services to anatomy 

 and physiology can altogether atone. Yet most likely 

 it was this same error, an error which practically led to 

 the enslavement of Medicine till the seventeenth century, 

 which caused Cardan to regard him, and not Hippocrates, 

 as his master. The vastness and catholicity of Galen's 

 scheme of Medicine must have been peculiarly attractive 

 to a man of Cardan's temper ; and that Galen attempted 

 to reconcile the incongruous in the teleological system 

 which he devised, would not have been rated as a fault 

 by his Milanese disciple. 



Galen taught as a cardinal truth the doctrine of the 



