Ginger in Girolamo Cardano's Contradictiones

Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was an Italian physician renowned in his own time for his medical knowledge. As one part of a vast web of physicians and medical texts and treatises, Cardano wrote his Contradictiones, which has never been translated into English, in order to comment on the nature and structure of humoral medicine as described by Greek, Latin, and Arab writers. Cardano’s broader purpose as described in the introduction to the Contradictiones is to address a need for physicians to answer long standing disagreements within the primary sources of medical practice that were relied upon for treatment and diagnosis. This thesis focuses on the translation and analysis of contradictions twelve and thirteen, both of which describe the herb ginger, and explores Cardano’s claims of qualified objectivity to examine how the Contradictiones serves as a device to spread his own perspectives on certain treatises and the physicians who wrote them.