It also helps greatly to keep our food in the proper order: to eat liquid foods first, broths, fish and foods that spoil sooner in the stomach; foods harder to digest must come last. Crato would have supper smaller than dinner. Cardan, Contradictions, book 1, treatise 5, contradiction 18, rejects this on the authority of Galen, book 7 of the Art of Healing, chapter 6, and gives four reasons for making supper the larger meal.

I have read many treatises on this subject. I do not know how it may apply to a few particular patients, but for my own part, as a general rule for everyone, I would support the Roman custom of a light dinner and a generous supper. Their preparations and invitations were always for supper; dinner went unmentioned. I could give many reasons, but when everything has been said for and against, Cardan's rule is best: to keep to what we are accustomed to, even if it is bad. Nor is it wrong in some things to follow our inclination and appetite, and occasionally eat a harmful dish if we have an exceptional liking for it.

Alexander Severus loved hares and apples above all other foods, as Lampridius relates in his life; one pope loved pork, another peacock, and so on. What harm came of it? I conclude that our own experience is the best physician. The diet most beneficial to one person is often harmful to another, so different are our tastes, humours and constitutions. Let everyone observe himself and be a law to himself.

Tiberius, in Tacitus, laughed at everyone who, after the age of thirty, would ask other people's advice about diet. I say the same.

Anyone who keeps these few rules of diet will surely find great relief and a speedy remedy. It is astonishing to recount the extraordinary temperance of some hermits, anchorites and Fathers of the Church. Anyone who reads their lives, written by Jerome, Athanasius and others; how abstemious pagans have been in this respect—the Curii and Fabricii, those ancient philosophers, as Pliny records in book 11, and Xenophon in book 1 of his life of Socrates; emperors and kings, as Nicephorus relates in his Ecclesiastical History, book 18, chapter 8, concerning Maurice, Louis the Pious and others; and the admirable example of Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian patrician—cannot help admiring them.

They did this voluntarily, while in good health. What, then, should ordinary people do when illness visits them and they are obliged to recover and preserve their health? It is hard to follow a strict diet, and “he who lives by medical rules lives miserably,” as the saying goes. “What sort of life will it be, if you are deprived of these things?” One might as well be buried as have one's appetite so restricted. “The remedy has exceeded the disease”—the treatment is more troublesome than the illness: so he complained in the poet, and so you think.

Yet anyone who loves himself will readily endure this little misery to avoid a greater trouble: “the least of evils”; better do this than fare worse. And, as Cicero maintains, better be a temperate old man than a dissolute youth. The one sweet course, as he advises, is to govern ourselves so that we may have “old age in youth, and in youth old age”: be youthful in our old age, steady in our youth, prudent and temperate in both.