JEROME CARDAN 223 



called to the bedside of a patient, to visit for more than 

 three days, unless he receives an attestation that the 

 sick man has made fresh confession of his sins/' 1 

 Cardan, with his irritable temper, may very likely have 

 treated this regulation as an unwarrantable interference 

 with his profession, and have paid no attention to it. 

 Again, he evidently followed Hippocrates in rejecting 

 the supernatural origin of disease ; a position greatly in 

 advance of that held by certain of the leading physiolo- 

 gists of the time. 2 Thus in more ways than one he may 

 have laid himself open to some charge of disrespect shown 

 to religion or to the spiritual powers. The absence of 

 any other specific accusation and the circumstances of 

 his incarceration, taken in conjunction with the foregoing 

 considerations, almost compel the conclusion that his 

 arrest and imprisonment in 1570 were brought about by 

 a charge of impiety whispered by some envious tongue 

 which will never now be identified. The sanction 

 given by the authorities of the Church to his writings 

 in 1562, operated without doubt to mitigate the 

 punishment which fell upon him, and suffered him, after 

 due purgation of his offences, to enjoy for the residue 

 of his days a life comparatively quiet and prosperous 

 under the patronage of Pius V. 



Though he was let out of prison he was not yet a free 

 man. For some twelve weeks longer he remained a 

 prisoner in his own house, the bond for eighteen hundred 

 gold crowns having doubtless been given on this account. 

 Almost his last reflection about his life at Bologna is 

 one in which he records his satisfaction that all the men 

 who plotted against him there met their death soon 



1 Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. i. p. 246. 



2 Mr. Stephen Paget in his life of Ambroise Pare, the great con- 

 temporary French surgeon, gives an interesting account of Park's 

 beliefs on the divine cause of the plague, p. 269. 



