CIGARETTE PAPERS

Southland Times, Issue 21831, 7 October 1932, Page 8

CIGARETTE PAPERS

JOHN CAIUS. Yesterday as well as to-day Cambridge proudly remembered John Caius as a pious founder, although when he was alive Cambridge regarded him as an intolerable nuisance. He came back to Gonville, his old college, foremost practitioner of his day, medical adviser to Queen Mary, President of the College of Physicians—but what a fusser! Undergraduates found every detail of life regulated by his statutes; what they must spend in food and drink, and how they must fix their candles at night. He refused admission to the deaf, dumb, deformed or lame—and to Welshmen! Breach of rules he punished by putting even dons in the stocks. Small wonder the college ungratefully rejoiced when, his books Laving been burnt on suspicion of Popery, he quitted Cambridge in dudgeon.

But —he made Caius the nursery of medicine: destined to number among its sons Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, Daffy of Daffy’s Elixir, Dover of Dover powders. His influence procured for the college the bodies of two felons a year for dissection.

Was it some malicious undergraduate who put Shakespeare up to caricaturing him, in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” as a fidgetty Frenchman? A bad shot: for he was born in Norwich on October 6, 1510,