Thomas Wharton's Adenographia, first published in London in 1656

as from his broad reading. She shows just how central to his thought were Cardano's neglected commentaries on the Hippocratic Corpus. Like every commentator since antiquity, he recast Hippocrates in his own image to justify his own ideas. Siraisi's consideration of Cardano's belated adoption of anatomical practices is also especially welcome, focusing on his rhetorical use of autopsy to vindicate his diagnostic pronouncements and promote his clinical practice. Cardano did not sit comfortably within any of the disciplinary discourses of his day, for all his desire to be accepted. An autodidact and a mathematician, he had an unusual approach to many problems and he argued his position in clumsy and rebarbative prose instead of deploying scholastic logic or humanist rhetoric. His heroes were Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Plotinus, rather than Aristotle and Galen, but he sought the reform rather than the destruction of scholastic philosophy and medicine. He was not averse to ascribing occult causation, and he collected talismanic gems, but he attributed lovesickness and impotence, from both of which he suffered himself, to humoral rather than hidden causes. In discussing demons and incantations, he steered a middle course between the Platonism of Ficino and Fernel and the sceptical Aristotelianism of Pomponazzi. His work on the praeternatural was consequently as useful to orthodox demonologists as it was to sceptics. The encyclopaedic interests and idiosyncratic positions of Cardano have made him as difficult for historians to pigeonhole as he was for his contemporaries. Although renowned and reviled as an occult philosopher, he can hardly be described as a Neoplatonist. Despite his stress on observation, he remained deeply indebted to medieval authorities. As a result of this complexity, Siraisi's study, for all its many virtues, cannot be regarded as the last word on Cardano's medical practice and ideas, or their interaction with other aspects of his thought. Siraisi gives due attention to dietetics and the interpretation of dreams, but she barely touches on the possible influence of his interest in physiognomy and judicial astrology on his diagnostics and therapeutics. The vast range of topics discussed by Cardano provides innumerable ways in which his works can be used to shed light on Renaissance medicine. Cardano's posthumous notoriety, not as a medical practitioner but alongside Agrippa and Paracelsus as one of the anti-Christian occult philosophers, or deluded natural magicians, or heroic precursors of freethinking, has survived for a surprisingly long time. Siraisi's study is not …