et; 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,[149] 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
compound to be sharpened, if necessary, by the addition of blister fly, or
rendered less searching by leaving out the euphorbium and mustard. Cardan
adds, that, by the use of this persuasive application, he had sometimes
brought out two pints of water in twenty-four hours. The use of the
shower-bath and plentiful rubbing with dry cloths was also recommended.

The purging of the body was largely a question of diet. To prevent
generation of moisture, perfumes were to be used; the patient was to sleep
on raw silk and not upon feathers, and to let an hour and a half come
between supper and bed-time. Sleep, after all, was the great thing to be
sought. The Archbishop was counselled to sleep from seven to ten hours,
and to subtract time from his studies and his business and add the same to
sleep.[150]

Cardan's treatment, which seems to have been suggested as much by the man
of common-sense as by the physician, soon began to tell favourably upon
the Archbishop. He remained for thirty-five days in charge of his patient,
during which time the distemper lost its virulence and the patient gained
flesh. In the meantime the fame of his skill had spread abroad, and
well-nigh the whole nobility of Scotland flocked to consult him,[151] and
they paid him so liberally that on one day he made nineteen golden crowns.
But when winter began to draw near, Cardan felt that it was time to move
southward. He feared the cold; he longed to get back to his sons, and he
was greatly troubled by the continued ill-behaviour of one of the servants
he had brought with him--"maledicus, invidus, avarissimus, Dei
contemptor;" but he found his patient very loth to let him depart. The
Archbishop declared that his illness was alleviated but not cured, and
only gave way unwillingly when Cardan brought forward arguments to show
what dangers and inconvenienc