Note 2785 — Chapter LXX

The sum has become 400 ducats in Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, Paris, 1842, I, 135, and Pouchet (1853), pp. 532-3. Colle (1823), p. 17, questioned the story on the ground that Peter at the age of thirty-five or thirty-seven would be too young to charge such a fee, and for the better reason that the chronicler Filippo Villani tells the same tale of a Florentine physician. A prefatory note to the 1555 edition of the De venenis states that when Peter taught at Bologna—which he probably did not do—he would not visit a patient outside of that town for less than fifty florins, so great was his reputation. Honorius IV therefore at first promised him a fee of one hundred florins but gave him one thousand when he recovered his health as a result of Peter’s ministrations.