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Jerome Cardan or Girolamo Cardano was born at Pavia in 1501, about one year after Benvenuto Cellini, that other famous autobiographer, saw the light of day. Neither of these great characters has lacked for biographical sketches by competent writers, but it is in the personal accounts of their lives and of their times that one encounters the real expressions of their personality traits.
Cardan was a great physician of his time, living vigorously for seventy-five years and participating in many activities from dueling to mathematics in addition to his medical duties. The first forty years of his life were filled with a struggle with poverty, professional jealousy, matrimonial and family difficulties, disgrace and ill health, but at the same time he gambled, debated, wrote, and taught mathematics, and in these was comparatively happy. At the age of forty-four his great algebra—a mathematic masterpiece—the Ars Magna, was published, containing rules and principles which still bear his name. He wrote in Latin and his productions on various subjects were enough to fill seven thousand pages of folio. His medical writings are in four huge volumes of Spon's 1663 edition of the Opera Omnia. The present book on his life was written from the vantage ground of his seventy-fifth year.
Judging from the record of his thoughts and doings as expressed in these chapters, Cardan was a mine of pathology, much of which was apparently psychogenic in origin and import. He was sickly, filled with fears and anxiety, a sufferer from cardiac palpitation, impotent for ten years while in the prime of life, he had polydipsia and polyuria, was morbidly superstitious (even for his times), and often depressed and suicidal. He also complained of a period of insomnia lasting eight days and recurring four times annually. His delineation of his own physical appearance corresponds with Kretschmer's asthenic habitus, and most certainly his temperament was largely schyzothymic. As to his voice,