(After the portrait in the hall of All Souls’ College, Oxford.)
Thomas Sydenham was born at Wynford Eagle, Dorsetshire, England, in 1624. At the age of eighteen he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, and remained there until 1644, when he enlisted in the Parliamentary Army. After a brief military service, he resumed his studies at the university and received his Bachelor’s degree in 1648. It was only at a much later date (1676), however, that he was given (after he had pursued the prescribed course of studies) the degree of Doctor of Medicine,—and then not by Oxford, but by Cambridge. After leaving the university he first spent a few months at the Medical School of Montpellier, France, and then settled (1666) in London as a practicing physician, the necessary license having been granted him by the College of Physicians. His first medical treatise, which bore the title “Methodus Curandi Febres” [Method of Treating Fevers], was published in 1666. The third edition of this work was issued ten years later, but with the title changed to “Observationes Medicae etc.” Between 1666 and 1683 he published several other treatises, the more important of which deal with epidemic diseases—syphilis, small-pox, hysteria and gout.
During the later period of Sydenham’s career he attained great celebrity as a physician; but this celebrity would have been short-lived if it had rested on nothing more substantial than mere cleverness and professional success. As a matter of fact he had brought about, by his teaching and also by his example, a most important revolution in medicine, and it was the appreciation of this fact which led the physicians of England to bestow upon him, after his death, the appellation of “The English Hippocrates,” and which ultimately gave him so highly honorable a position in the history of medicine in general. A brief review of the state of medicine in England during the seventeenth century will enable the reader to understand the full importance of the change which Sydenham was instrumental in bringing about.
The physicians of that period were split up into three sects: the followers of Galen, with whom should be classed the Graeco-Arabists; the iatrochemists; and the iatrophysicists.
The Galenists were largely intent upon the strictest interpretation of the teachings of Hippocrates, Galen and some of the Arabian authors. Instead of studying disease itself they devoted their time and thoughts largely to the interpretation of the words used by these fathers in medicine—i.e., to philology. Real progress in the science of medicine was not possible along this route. Accepting without dispute the dogma of the four humoral qualities, together with the different temperaments which result from the predominance of any one of them, they combated these different temperaments or constitutions by prescribing drugs in a very great variety of combinations (polypharmacy).
The iatrochemists, attaching small importance to simple dietetic measures, prescribed without stint all the most active substances belonging to the mineral kingdom and all the new remedies which the chemists had evolved from their furnaces.
Finally, the iatrophysicists directed their efforts to the removal or diminution of all bodily conditions that appeared to act as mechanical hindrances to health.
Sydenham, who possessed a rare degree of common sense, cast aside all these hypotheses, disregarded the prevailing routine methods of treatment, and refused to accept the therapeutic novelties of the day. “Nature is to be my guide,” he declared, and from that time forward he studied disease at the bedside, and watched carefully, and with a mind free from prejudice, the effects of the remedies which he employed. Thus, pursuing the methods advocated by the great master Hippocrates, he was able to place his medical brethren once more on the pathway which leads to an increase in knowledge of the healing art. Practical medicine, which had previously been falling into an almost moribund condition, was by his efforts made again a living and growing science. That Sydenham had a perfectly clear conception of what was needed at that time to renew the vitality of the medical profession of England is plainly shown by the following statement which he makes in the dedication of one of his writings to Dr. Mapletoft:—[78]
After studying medicine for a few years at the University of Oxford, I returned to London and entered upon the practice of my profession. As I devoted myself with all possible zeal to the work in hand it was not long before I realized thoroughly that the best way of increasing one’s knowledge of medicine is to begin applying, in actual practice, such principles as one may already have acquired; and thus I became convinced that the physician who earnestly studies, with his own eyes,—and not through the medium of books,—the natural phenomena of the different diseases, must necessarily excel in the art of discovering what, in any given case, are the true indications as to the remedial measures that should be employed. This was the method in which I placed my entire faith, being fully persuaded that if I took Nature for my guide, I should never stray far from the right road, even if from time to time I might find myself traversing ground that was wholly new to me.
In the brief account which I have thus far given of the part played by Sydenham in advancing the science of medicine, I have called attention only to the general character of the services which he rendered. It may now be interesting to furnish here a few details that will aid in completing the picture of this great English physician,—details relating to his life and personal character, to his views regarding certain diseases and the remedies which he was in the habit of employing for their relief or cure, and to his later writings.