Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [30]
In 1532, after five years in Sacco, Cardano moved back to Milan, hoping to have his work published and once again applying for membership in the College of Physicians. On both fronts he was roundly rejected. “In those days,” he wrote, “I was sickened so to the heart that I would visit diviners and wizards so that some solution might be found to my manifold troubles.”18 One wizard suggested he shield himself from moon rays. Another that, on waking, he sneeze three times and knock on wood. Cardano followed all their prescriptions, but none changed his bad fortune. And so, hooded, he took to sneaking from building to building at night, surreptitiously treating patients who either couldn’t afford the fees of sanctioned doctors or else didn’t improve in their care. To supplement the income he earned from that endeavor, he wrote in his autobiography, he was “forced to the dice again so that I could support my wife; and here my knowledge defeated fortune, and we were able to buy food and live, though our lodgings were desolate.”19 As for The Book on Games of Chance, though he would revise and improve the manuscript repeatedly in the years to come, he never again sought to have it published, perhaps because he realized it wasn’t a good idea to teach anyone to gamble as well as he could.
Cardano eventually achieved his goals in life, obtaining both heirs and fame—and a good deal of fortune to boot. The fortune began to accrue when he published a book based on his old college paper, altering the title from the somewhat academic “On the Differing Opinions of Physicians” to the zinger On the Bad Practice of Medicine in Common Use. The book was a hit. And then, when one of his secret patients, a well-known prior of the Augustinian order of friars, suddenly (and in all likelihood by chance) improved and attributed his recovery to Cardano’s care, Cardano’s fame as a physician took off on an upward spiral that reached such heights the College of Physicians felt compelled not only to grant him membership but also to make him its rector. Meanwhile he was publishing more books, and they did well, especially one for the general public called The Practice of Arithmetic. A few years later he published a more technical book, called the Ars magna, or The Great Art, a treatise on algebra in which he gave the first clear picture of negative numbers and a famous analysis of certain algebraic equations. When he reached his early fifties, in the mid-1550s, Cardano was at his peak, chairman of medicine at the University of Pavia and a wealthy man.
His good fortune didn’t last. To a large extent what brought Cardano down was the other part of his legacy—his children. When she was sixteen, his daughter Chiara (named after his mother) seduced his older son, Giovanni, and become pregnant. She had a successful abortion, but it left her infertile. That suited her just fine, for she was boldly promiscuous, even after her marriage, and contracted syphilis. Giovanni went on to become a doctor but was soon more famous as a petty criminal, so famous he was blackmailed into marriage by a family of gold diggers who had proof that he had murdered, by poison, a minor city official. Meanwhile Aldo, Cardano’s younger son who as a child had engaged in the torture of animals, turned that passion into work as a freelance torturer for the Inquisition. And like Giovanni, he moonlighted as a crook.
A few years after his marriage Giovanni gave one of his servants a mysterious mixture to incorporate into a cake for Giovanni’s wife. When she keeled over after enjoying her dessert, the authorities put two and two together. Despite Gerolamo’s spending a fortune on lawyers, his attempts to pull strings, and his testimony on his son’s behalf, young Giovanni was executed in prison a short while later. The drain on Cardano’s funds and reputation made him vulnerable to his old enemies. The senate in Milan expunged his name