eir own in natural history. He
had been the intimate friend of Pope Leo X, Pope Adrian VI made him a
canon of the Cathedral of Como and he was one of the close associates
and a domestic prelate of Clement VII, who assigned him apartments in
the Vatican. Jovius made a magnificent collection of memorials of the
illustrious men whose lives he wrote, and we owe to him the
preservation of many historical materials that would otherwise almost
inevitably have been lost.

Still another of the physicians of Clement VII was Matteo Corti, of
whom Aller declares that "he was as great in speech as with the
scalpel, read the Greek authors and taught his colleagues to prefer
them to the Arabs and recalled Galen into the schools." He was
summoned from Venice to be physician to Pope Clement because of "the
great reputation for knowledge of disease and skill in the treatment
of patients that he had gained." He is noted for having modified the
habits of the Romans by advising them to take less food in the middle
of the day and to take a better meal at night. This putting back of
the principal meal gradually spread in the cities of the world until
the present custom of evening dinner became established. He wrote a
series of books, but his constant insistence was on the avoidance of
disease by careful attention to diet and mode of living rather than by
the cure of it. He made it his special boast that many of those who
followed his directions were either not ill for years or else were
afflicted with but minor ailments. After the death of Pope Clement he
was professor of medicine in Bologna and then the physician of Cosimo
de Medici in Florence and at the end of his life held a professor's
chair in medicine at Pisa. Ghilinus in his work The Theatre of
Literary Men (_Teatro d'Uomini Letterati_) talks of Matteo Corti (in
Latin, Matthaeus Curtius), as "a very celebrated doctor of medicine
who as a professor was the peer of all and the superior {446} of most
of his colleagues and who revived with benefit to his students and
their patients the true manner of treating illness according to
Hippocrates and Galen." He was looked upon as one of the distinguished
physicians of his time. He wrote concerning the manner of dining and
supping, (_De Prandio et Coena_), a commentary on Mondino's anatomy
and a book On Venesection and another On Dosage.

Paul III (1534-49).--One of the distinguished consultant physicians of
the mid-sixteenth century was An