The iatromechanical school ran a course not unprofit' able to science, yet was unfruitful of real advance in the domain of practical medicine. The man of this particular age, who, more than any other, exerted an influence destined to be prolonged even to the present time, and probably much longer, who had a cool, clear, and unprejudiced spirit, and who sought the true value of medicine, and recompense for the same in the benefits which it brings to the sick, without scorning or neglecting its scientific side, was Thomas Sydenham, bora at Winford Eagle in 1624. a student at Oxford in 1642, and recipient of a bachelor's degree of medicine in 1648.
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The next fifteen years of his life we know practically nothing of, save that he spent some time in Montpellier pursuing his medical studies. In 1663 he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians, but did not take his degree of Doctor until 1676,—thirteen years before his death. His chief work—Medical Observations—is said to have been originally written in English, and translated into Latin; it first appeared in 1666,—the year when fire and plague devastated London. He died of gout in 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. During the earliest years of the plague in London he fled, as was the general custom of that day.
His model was Hippocrates. In pathology he was a humoralist without being a theorist. He knew only one standard,—observation and experience. Sharing the opinions of his day, he laid but little weight upon anatomy and physiology; yet he recognized their value when employed in the production of hypotheses. He conceived of disease as active, operative,—a natural effort of the body to remove morbid material from the blood; if this effort is violent and speedy, we have to do, he says, with an acute disease, but if slow and difficult, the condition is chronic. Fever was supposed to result mostly from cold or from epidemic influences. As causes of disease, he considered unknown influences and changes of the atmosphere very important. In his special pathology "inflammation of the blood" played the chief rôle, and upon it were made to depend nearly all acute and some chronic diseases. He arrived at what he called the "healing power of Nature," for which he made great claims in his description and observation of epidemics: but he believed there always remained a good deal for the physician to do, and in treating syphilis he even gave mercury until two kilogrammes of saliva were discharged daily. As compared with the therapeutics of that day his were manifestly simple,—and yet he employed, for example, eighteen different herbs in one prescription, and that merely an ointment. The unreliability of the action of drugs induced him to rely upon specifics, as did Paracelsus, but he acknowledged only one such,—the then new discovery, cinchona,—not even allowing mercury such a position in the treatment of syphilis. Such drugs as he chose were mainly from the vegetable kingdom.
The great importance of Sydenham, and all his statements, so far as we are concerned, centres about his struggle for the elucidation of the healing power of Nature, and for simple observation and simpler treatment, as opposed to the overgrown luxuriance of previous systems and theories. He became the standard-bearer of his age in his return to Hippocrates's method and art of healing, which are founded on the nature of things and on the limits of human ability.
Sydenham was vehemently opposed by Richard Morton (1625-1648), of London, who, like Fernel, considered all diseases to be a poisoning of the vital spirits. Sydenham was also antagonized by Gideon Harvey, who ridiculed his medical contemporaries without stint, because most of them, for febrile disease, gave cathartics from the second day, and began treatment with emetics. With delightful satire Harvey divided the physicians of the day into six classes: the Ferrea, Asinaria, Jesuitica, Aquaria, Laniaria, and Stercoraria, according as their favorite systems of treatment were the administration of iron, asses' milk, cinchona, mineral water, venesection, or purgatives.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), who still enjoys a great reputation, was the author of the works entitled Religlo Medici and Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. The latter appeared in 1646, but does not seem to have protected its author from the worst error of his age,—viz., superstition,—since, in 1664, he swore that two condemned old women were actual witches.
Having considered the progress of medicine during the seventeenth century, it may be well to glance likewise at surgical progress. Among the Italians Santoro, already spoken of as the inventor of various instruments, should be mentioned; also Valsalva, who obtained a sound reputation as an operator, employed the ligature, and recommended a starvation plan for treating aneurism; Magati (1579-1647). who contended against the abuses of treating wounds by filling them with plasters, balsam, poultices, tents, etc., and of changing the dressing several times a day.—once in four days was better, he said; Severino (1580-1656), first a lawyer, then a professor at Xaples, and later an eminent surgeon, a good anatomist, and a particular friend of the actual cautery; Marchetti (1589-1673), a bold, versatile operator of Padua; and Borri, of Milan (1625-1695), skilled as an operator and an oculist but better known because of his sad fate, since he died in the prison of the Inquisition, alter a prison-life of twenty-five years, on account of too liberal religious views. There were also numerous other Italian surgeons who made a name, especially in plastic surgery, and particularly in that branch of it named rhinoplasty, by whose efforts one method of manufacturing a new nose came to be known as the "Italian method."