Up to the time of his admission to the College, Jerome had never felt that he could depend entirely upon medicine for his livelihood. He now determined to publish his _Practica Arithmeticae_, the book which he had prepared _pari passu_ with the ill-starred _De Malo Medendi_. It seems to have been thoroughly revised and corrected, and was finally published in 1539, in Milan; Cardan only received ten crowns for his work, but the sudden fame he achieved as a mathematician ought to have set him on firm ground. His friends were still working to secure for him benefits yet more substantial. Alfonso d'Avalos, Francesco della Croce, the jurisconsult whose name has already been mentioned, and the senator Sfondrato, were doing their best to bring the physicians of the city into a more reasonable temper, and they finally succeeded in 1539; when, after having been denied admission for twelve years, Jerome Cardan became a member of the College, and a sharer in all the privileges appertaining thereto. Though Cardan was now a fully qualified physician, he spent his time for the next year or two rather with letters than with medicine. He worked hard at Greek, and as the result of his studies published somewhat prematurely a treatise, _De Immortalitate Animorum_, a collection of extracts from Greek writers which Julius Caesar Scaliger with justice calls a confused farrago of other men's learning.[76] He published also about this period the treatise on Judicial Astrology, and the Essay _De Consolatione_, the only one of his books which has been found worthy of an English translation.[77] In 1541 he became Rector of the College of Physicians, but there is no record of any increase in the number of his patients by reason of this superadded dignity. A passage in the _De Vita Propria_, written with even more than his usual brutal candour, gives a graphic view of his manner of life at this period. "It was in the summer of the year 1543, a time when it was my custom to go every day to the house of Antonio Vicomercato, a gentleman of the city, and to play chess with him from morning till night. As we were wont to play for one real, or even three or four, on each game, I, seeing that I was generally the winner, would as a rule carry away with me a gold piece after each day's play, sometimes more and sometimes less. In the case of Vicomercato it was a pleasure and nothing else to spend money in this wise; but in my own there was an element of conflict as well; and in this manner I lost my self-respect so completely that, for two years and more, I took no thought of practising my art, nor considered that I was wasting all my substance--save what I made by play--that my good name and my studies as well would suffer shipwreck. But on a certain day towards the end of August, a new humour seized Vicomercato (either advisedly on account of the constant loss he suffered, or perhaps because he thought his decision