The most remarkable of these persons was Cornaro, an Italian nobleman, who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and who attained the age of upwards of a hundred years. He seems in middle life to have suffered from dyspepsia, brought on by over-indulgence; for he says that he had "fallen into different kinds of disorders, such as pains in my stomach, and often stitches, and spices of the gout, attended by, what was almost still worse, an almost continual slow fever, a stomach generally out of order, and a perpetual thirst." At the age of forty, he decided that abstemiousness and regularity should be the order of his life, instead of the previous course of indulgence in eating and drinking, which was surely driving him to his grave. He kept his resolution for a year, at the end of which time he declared himself free of all his complaints. He states that his rule was to take as much food and wine as would check appetite without completely satisfying it. "I accustomed myself," he says, "to contrive matters so as never to cloy my stomach with eating and drinking; but constantly to rise from the table with a disposition to eat and drink still more.... What with bread, meat, the yolk of an egg, and soup, I ate as much as weighed in all 12 oz., neither more nor less. I drank in all 14 oz. of wine." Cornaro lived on this meagre diet to a vigorous old age. He wrote several treatises on the subject of diet, urging others to follow his example; one of these was written when he had attained the age of ninety-five, and shows that he was in full possession of his faculties.