asthma, he forbade him to subject himself to night air or rainy weather.  He must sleep on silk, not feathers, and use a dry pillow of chopped straw or sea-weed, but by no means of feathers.  He forbade suppers if too late, and asked the reverend lord to sleep ten hours, and even to take time from study or business and give it to bed.  He was to avoid purgatives, to breakfast lightly, and to drink slowly at intervals four pints a day of new asses’ milk.  As to other matters, he was to walk some time in the shade at an early hour, and, discussing the time for the fullest meal, Cardan remarks that established habits as to this point are not to be lightly considered.  His directions as to diet are many, reasonable, and careful.  His patient, once stout, had become perilously thin.  Turtle-soup and snail-broth would help him.  Cardan insisted also on the sternest rules as to hours of work, need for complete rest, daily exercise, and was lucky enough to restore his patient to health and vigor.  The great churchman was grateful, and seems to have well understood the unusual mental qualities of his physician.  Nothing on the whole could be better than the advice Cardan gave, and the story is well worth reading as an illustration of the way in which a man of genius rises above the level of the routine of his day.

I might go farther back in time, and show by examples that the great fathers of medicine have usually possessed a like capacity, and learned much from experience of that which, emphasized by larger use and explained by scientific knowledge, has found its way into the text-books of our own day and become common property.

It appears to me from a large mental survey of the gains of my profession, that the English have above all other races contributed the most towards enforcing the fact that on the whole dietetics, what a man shall eat and drink, and also how he shall live as to rest, exercise, and work, are more valuable than drugs, and do not exclude their use.[1]

[Footnote 1:  By this I mean that the physician, if forced to choose between absolute control of the air, diet, exercise, work, and general habits of a patient, and use of drugs without these, would choose the former, and yet there are cases where this decision would be a death-warrant to the patient.]

The active physician has usually little time nowadays to give to the older books, but it is still a valuable lesson in common sense to read, not so much the generalizations as the cases of Whytt, Willis, Sydenham, and others.  Nearer our own day, Sir John Forbes, Bigelow, and Flint taught us the great lesson that many diseases are self-limited, and need only the great physician, Time, and reasonable dietetic care to get well without other aid.

There is a popular belief that we have learned this from homoeopathy, for the homoeopath, without knowing it, made for us on this matter ample experiments, and was as confident he was giving powerful medicines as we are that he was giving practically none.  “He builded better than he knew,” and certainly his results aided our ablest thinkers to reach the truth.