128 JEROME CARDAN 



co-exist with the loading of the brain with matter which 

 would certainly putrify if retained for any long time. 

 Cardan maintained that the serous humour descended 

 into the lungs, not by the passages, but by soaking 

 through the membranes as through linen. 1 After 

 describing the origin and the mode of descent of this 

 humour, he goes on to search for an auxiliary cause of 

 the mischief, and this he finds in the imperfect digestive 

 powers of the stomach and liver. If the cause lay 

 entirely in the brain, how was it that all the cerebral 

 functions were not vitiated ? In fine, the source of the 

 disease lay, not in the weakness of the brain, but in an 

 access of heat, caused possibly by exposure to the sun, 

 by which the matter of the brain had become so rarefied 

 that it showed unhealthy activity in absorbing moisture 

 from the other parts. This heat, therefore, must be 

 reduced. 



To accomplish this end three lines of treatment must 

 be followed. First, a proper course of diet ; second, 

 drugs ; and third, certain manual operations. As to 

 diet, the Archbishop was ordered to take nothing but 

 light and cooling food, two to four pints of asses' milk 

 in the early morning, drawn from an ass fed on cooling 

 herbs, and to use all such foods as had a fattening 

 tendency ; tortoise or turtle-soup, 2 distilled snails, barley- 

 water and chicken-broth, and divers other rich edibles. 

 The purging of the brain was a serious business ; it was 

 to be compassed by an application to the coronal suture 

 of an ointment made of Greek pitch, ship's tar, white 

 mustard, euphorbium, and honey of anathardus : the 



1 "Per totam tunicam sicut in linteis." Opera, torn. ix. p. 128. 



2 " Accipe testudinem maximam et illam incoque in aqua, donee 

 dissolvatur, deinde abjectis corticibus accipiantur caro, et ossa et 

 viscera omnia mundata." Opera, torn. ix. p. 140. 



