The practice of medicine during the Borgian Era appears to have been entirely empirical. Physicians experimented on the vile body of their patient, trusting to luck, or chance, or faith, to work a cure. In contracts it was expressly stated that physicians must have the reputation of being _fortunate_ (felix). Chirugeons were totally unaware of the circulation of the blood. So much stress here is laid upon the art and craft and mystery of medicine and its exponents, because from these, and from these alone, the knowledge and use of venoms could be obtained; and, if the blind can lead the blind without both falling into the same ditch, then there might be some foundation in fact for the legend of the Borgia Venom. But while physicians and chirugeons and apothecaries solemnly bought three little boys for a ducat each, drew off their blood and sublimed it into a potion to save the life of a senile pontiff; or did such monkey-tricks as Messer Juan de Vigo did to the Lord Julius P.P. II a few years later, all with quite convincing evidence of gravity and good faith, one must conclude that these mages acted according to the very best of their knowledge and belief; but that, in quantity as well as quality, their belief was vastly superior to their knowledge. Nardaeus says[73] “The famous chirugeon Juan de Vigo, perceiving that an ulcer of the Lord Julius P.P. II became every day more stubborn, and that the Pope persisted in refusing all manner of remedies, hit upon a new method of cure: for he boiled together, in a brass kettle, for three hours, old rags cut in pieces, crumbs of fine bread, plantain, and a fomentation of arsenic sublimed in rosewater; after which, drying them, and applying them by way of powder to the wound (to which he had sworn that he would apply no more plaisters,) he cured the Pope in a very short time, to the admiration of all concerned.” Infantile as was the condition of medical science in regard to life, it was not one jot more robust in its observations of death. The cases of the suspicious demises of two cardinals, not during the reign of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, but a few years later, will illustrate this. In 1508, during the reign of the eternal enemy of Borgia the Lord Julius P.P. II, a nephew of His Holiness died, the Lord Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere, Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of San Pietro _ad Vincula_. And, says Mgr. Paris de Grassis (Burchard’s inimical successor as Caerimonarius,[74] “I saw on his face and on his body such spots as seemed to be the effect of a dose of venom; and all the others formed the same opinion.” After autopsy, the chirugeons found no venom, but “certain bloody spots: wherefore they judged him to have died of a superfluity of blood; and, if he had been phlebotomized, he would have had no harm.”