became celebrated. He studied medicine under John Baptist Montanus, an eminent physician, and anatomy under the yet more distinguished Andreas Vesalius, in whose house he resided for eight months. On 13 May 1541 he was created M.D. of the university of Padua. On quitting Padua he proceeded on a tour through Italy, and his observations, recorded in the treatise above referred to, on the libraries and the state of learning in Venice, Florence, Urbino, Ferrara, Sienna, Bologna, Pisa, and Rome, though brief, are of considerable interest. At Florence he was the guest of Cosmo de' Medici. On leaving Italy he proceeded on a similar tour through France and Germany, and in the latter country he mentions, as scholars with whom he became well acquainted, Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius, and Sebastian Munster. His main object during these months appears to have been to obtain, by the collation of the best manuscripts, an accurate text of Galen and Hippocrates. He also took especial pains to note the practice of continental scholars in the pronunciation of Greek, and finding that this was generally in conformity with the older method, he eventually gave his deliberate verdict in favour of this method (as opposed to that recently introduced at Cambridge) in his treatise 'De Pronunciatione Græcæ et Latinæ Linguæ.'
He returned to England in 1544, and shortly after, at the command of Henry VIII, commenced to deliver lectures on anatomy, which were attended by many of the principal surgeons in London. According to his own statement (De Libris propriis, p. 171), he continued these lectures for a period of twenty years. He appears, however, to have been resident for some time at Shrewsbury, and again at Norwich. On 21 Dec. 1547 he was admitted a fellow of the College of Physicians, was an elect in 1550, and a member of the council in the ensuing year. During his residence in Shrewsbury the 'sweating sickness' broke out, and at the request of his friend Robert Warmington he compiled a short tract in English, 'A Boke or Counseill against the Sweate or Sweating Sicknesse,' which he afterwards expanded into the longer Latin treatise, 'De Ephemera Britannica.' He was shortly after appointed one of the Physicians to King Edward VI, and retained his post under Queen Mary. In the practice of his profession Caius soon acquired considerable wealth, which, being unmarried, he resolved to employ in the encouragement of science and learning. Foremost among his schemes was the refounding of Gonville Hall, the home of his early education. On 4 Sept. 1557 he obtained letters patent from Philip and Mary empowering him to carry out his design, and the college from this time became known as Gonville and Caius College, he being declared a co-founder with Edmund Gonville and William Bateman, bishop of Norwich. In the following year, on the occasion probably of his being incorporated M.D. of the university, he revisited Cambridge, apparently for the first time subsequently to his leaving England for Padua (Hist. Cant. Academiæ, p. 3), and his account of his impressions shows how great had been the change in the university during the preceding twenty years. In January 1559 he 'unwillingly and with much entreaty' was prevailed upon to accept the mastership of the college, vacant by the death of Thomas Bacon, but he altogether refused to receive a stipend or emoluments in any form. To this circumstance and his known munificent intentions in relation to the society we may attribute the fact that when, in the following September, the royal commission visited the university and displaced the heads who were known to favour catholicism, he was left undisturbed in his office. His benefactions to his college were both judicious and munificent. He enlarged the original site of the buildings, and erected an additional court, together with the three gates of Humility, Virtue, and Honour—the last being executed after his death from plans which he had prepared, 'indiflerently copied, in the late Professor Willis's opinion, 'from the sepulchral monuments of the ancients,' and representing probably a reminiscence of his observations in Italy. His eminence, now almost unrivalled, in his profession led to his being retained in his office of chief royal physician on the accession of Elizabeth; and on the occasion of her visit to the university in 1564 he was assigned the initiatory part in the disputations in physics, as 'antient in the faculty.' As,however,the enactments against catholics increased in stringency, he could no longer be exempted from their operation, and in 1568 he was dismissed from his post of royal physician, a proceeding suggested perhaps by prudential considerations quite as much as by religious intolerance. His reputation among his own profession continued unimpaired. In 1571 he was for the ninth time elected to the office of president of the College of Physicians. The distinction thus conferred upon him was more than repaid by the eminent services which he rendered to the society. In the notable dispute between the physicians and the surgeons, when the former body challenged the right of the latter to administer internal remedies as part of their treatment of external maladies, he appeared before the commissioners
