JEROME CARDAN,
WE congratulate Mr. Waters on this interesting and careful biography of a strange figure,—one of the strangest in the history of European culture and science. The work is most thoroughly done, being entirely based on original sources, and impressing the reader by its exactness and scholarship. Carden was a product of the Italian Renascence, with a strain of mediteve1 superstition bequeathed to him as a heritage. His career presents the most remarkable contradictions. On one side we have the keen-witted man of science, the famous physician who was sent for from Milan to St. Andrews to cure Archbishop Hamilton, and who was consulted by King Edward VI., the learned mathematician who carried on the science of algebra to a point unknown by the ancients and by the Moors of the Middle Ages. On the other side we feel ourselves in an atmosphere of quackery, in company with an Italian Zadkiel, who can scarcely set a step forward, can hardly eat, drink, or hear a sound, without noting some omen, without seeing some vision related to his own fate. Never did such a mixture of science and mere fantasy meet and manifest itself in the person of one man. Nor is it often that such divers fortnn e happens in a single life as in that of Carden. At one time he is totally destitute and a fugitive, with his family in the poorhonee of Milan. At another he is the most celebrated physician in Europe, appealed to in vain by Monarchs, and actually declining a splendid offer made to him by the Pope. In family relations he was unhappy all through his life, from the day of his illegitimate birth, through his rather sordid childhood and his early struggles, to the days when his wife died after a marriage of drudgery, and his son, after marrying a woman of bad character. was
• Jerome Cardan : a Biographical Study. By W. G. Waters. London : Lawrence and Sullen. (IS.. 6 4]
executed for procuring means of poisoning her. The career of Carden, indeed, sounds some of the depths of social life.
Cardan was born at Pavia in 1501, his father being a Milanese jurisconsult, his mother a young woman of whom little is known. The circumstances of his birth were strange and as soon as he came into the world the stars began to exert their power on his fate. The woman who nursed him was taken with the plague, the child himself was seized with an eruption of carbuncles on the face in the form of a cross; when he was eight he nearly died of dysentery and fever; then he fell downstairs, inflicting a scar on his forehead which remained through life, and while recovering from that mishap a atone fell from the roof of the next house and wounded his head severely. The boy led a solitary life, hearing aspersions of his mother's name, carrying his father's bag about the town, nervous, cross-grained, the inhabitant of an ill-regulated home. He entered the University of Pavia, and describes himself at that time in such an exact way as to show that Nature had denied to him all the physical graces. His chest was narrow, his eyes small, his front teeth large, his hair yellow and close cut. He says : "I am wont to talk too much, and in none too urbane a tone." His occult instincts led him to dwell on the shortness of the line of life in his palm. He took to gambling, a vice which stuck to him all his life ; indeed, it would seem that he derived the main part of his small income at Pavia from gains at dice. He also began to experience those strange dreams which visited him all his life, and to which he gave mystical interpretations. One of his early dreams was that his soul was in the heaven of the moon, where he was to remain seven thousand years under the guardian- ship of his father. After going through other stars, he was to enter the Kingdom of God. Cardan interpreted this dream in this wise :—" The Moon signifies Grammar ; Mercury Geometry and Arithmetic ; Venus Music, the Art of Divination and Poetry ; the Sun the Moral, and Jupiter the Natural World; Mars Medicine ; Saturn Agriculture, the knowledge of plants, and other minor arts. The eighth star stands for a gleaning of all mundane things, natural science and various other studies. After dealing with these I shall at last find my rest with the Prince of Heaven."
In 1536 Cardan published his first book, De Mato Recenti- orztm Medicorum Medendi Usus, in which he attacked the well-paid doctors of Milan, thereby incurring the wrath of the faculty,—no very good step to success. Carden had been appointed to a post in the Pavia Academy, but that institution was forced, through dearth of funds, to close its doors in 1543 and to leave its teachers unpaid. A post of very slender value in Milan was offered to Carden, which he accepted, and he was able to supplement its income by his practice, but his gambling robbed him of moat of his earnings, and Poverty claimed him for her own. It was about this time that he devoted himself specially to mathe- matics, publishing at Nuremberg, in 1545, his Book of the Great Art, with the result that his name was known all over Europe. In 1546 Pope Paul III. offered him a post in his household, which Carden declined; and in the year following the King of Denmark conveyed to him a magnifi- cent offer, which he also declined, because, as he said, " the country was very cold and damp, and the people well-nigh barbarians; moreover the rites and doctrines of religion were quite foreign to those of the Romieh Church." The last- named point gives occasion to say that though Carden was denounced as an atheist and was steeped in the lore of occultism and magic, and speculated on religion in a way which seems out of touch with Catholic Christianity, though he quotes the pagan philosophers twenty times for once that he quotes a father of the Church, yet he always claimed to be a good Catholic, and he seems to have entertained a strong dislike against the movement of the Reformation which was contemporary with him. In this he represents the Catholic semi-paganism of Italy. The account of his journey to England and Scotland and his impressions of Edward VI. are fall of interest. All the graces, in Cardan's judgment, waited on the young King, whose conversation showed frankness, gentleness, and subtlety of mind. He thought the English a cruel and fierce people, " brave in battle, but wanting in caution." His return to Italy was almost a Royal progress, for by this time he stood at the head of the medical profession in Europe. After his return be had a dispute with Scaliger, and he gave the world the .De Rerun Varietate, which was printed at Basel in 1553. In 1555 he reached the highest point of his fortunes. He was a collector of rare books, gems, vessels of brass and silver ; he was an ardent lover of music, and his house was filled with singing men and boys. When not engaged in music, he was apt to be gambling, and he tells us that his doors always stood open to dicers. Under the circumstances it is not sur- prising that his sons should have grown up profligates. The marriage of the elder, to which we have referred, was a source of unutterable misery to Cardan, and he never really rallied from the blow. It is characteristic of him that his mourning for his son should have been assuaged by occult means. When lying awake in bed he beard a voice in the dark which asked why he was grieving for his son's death. "Take the stone," said the voice, "which is hanging round your neck and place it to your mouth, and so long as you bold it there you will not be troubled with thoughts of your son." Cardan obeyed, and "in a moment all remembrance of my son faded from my mind, and the same thing happened when I fell asleep a second time after being aroused."
In 1565 Cardan had a narrow escape from being burnt to death through his bed catching fire twice in the same night. He found warning signs in these accidents, the smoke denoting disgrace, the fire peril, the flame a pressing danger to his life. He was, as a matter of fact, removed from his post of teacher But a later incident restored him to tranquillity. A manu- script sheet fell from the table to the ground and then flew up to the cornice of the room, where it hung, fixed to the woodwork. The occurrence was instantly made a symbol : " I see that the meaning of this portent must have been that, after the approaching shipwreck of my fortunes, my bark would be sped along with a more favouring breeze." The shipwreck came in the form of arrest in connection with a bond he gave for eighteen hundred gold crowns. While in prison mysterious knockings seemed to foreshadow doom. After his release he went to Rome, where he lived till his death. Here he had curious experiences, among them the vision of a peasant by his bed, who exclaimed "Te sin case," and disappeared. His old age must have been miser- able, if he really suffered from the diseases he enumerates,— " two attacks of the plague, agues. tertian and quotidian, malig- nant ulcers, hernia, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion, the itch, and foulness of skin." Relief from the plague came from a sweat, so great that it soaked the bed and ran in streams down the floor. At least so Cardan says. He also tells us that he never became warm below the knees till he had been in bed six hours. We do not know to which of these diseases he succumbed, but he died in Rome in 1576, his body being buried in the church of San Andrea, and afterwards transferred to Milan.
In the sphere of medicine Cardan was a disciple of Galen, the vastness and catholicity of whose scheme of medicine must, Mr. Waters holds, " have been peculiarly attractive to a man of Cardan's temper." Had he come under the regular discipline of Hippocrates, our author thinks, Carden would have been more truly scientific, and his work "immeasurably more fruitful of good." As it is, his great tomes, products of much learning and ingenuity, are all but forgotten, and his fame is obscured. He was, indeed, half genius, half "crank," and in many ways a most characteristic product of his country and his age.
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