Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689): his Life and Original Writings

Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689): his Life and Original Writings, by KENNEH DEWHURST, London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966, pp. viii, 180, illus. , 35s. Thomas Sydenham was 'the greatest physician this country has ever produced', Dr. Dewhurst claims boldly (p. vii). Parliamentarian soldier, member of a family which had helped to run England for Oliver Cromwell, himself a radical Whig, friend of Locke and admirer of Shaftesbury, pioneer of rational theology, Sydenham is typical of the radical Puritanism of many of the serious original Fellows of the Royal Society. Like Robert Boyle, Sydenham enjoyed the tremendous advantage of not having his education ruined at a seventeenth-century university. After fighting for Parliament in the civil war, he had only a brief spell at Oxford in 1647-8, before it had been purged by Parliamentary Commissioners and scientists (briefly) introduced (pp. 15-16). 'Physic', says Sydenham, 'is not to be learned by going to universities', but he is for taking apprentices; and says, 'one had as good send a man to Oxford to learn shoemaking as practising physic'. That comment by an undergraduate contemporary sums up Sydenham's wholly correct view (p. 17; cf. p. 72). He probably profited more by his experience as visiting physician at one of London's hospitals for the poor, where he could experiment in treating fevers 'before risking the lives of people of quality' (p. 30). Sydenham noted later that mortality from smallpox was far lower among the poor than among the rich. 'which cannot be thought referable to any other cause than that they are deprived through the narrowness of their fortunes and their rude way of living of the opportunities of hurting themselves with a more precise and tender keeping' (p. 116). Sydenham was a classical Baconian. Hypotheses derived from the Ancients have 'but confined and narrowed men's thoughts, amused their understanding with fine but useless speculations, and diverted their enquiries from the true and advantageous knowledge of things . He that in physic shall lay down fundamental maxims and from thence drawing consequence and raising dispute shall reduce it into the regular form of a science has indeed done something to enlarge the art of talking and perhaps laid a foundation for endless disputes . The most acute and ingenious part of men being by custom and education engaged in empty speculations, the improvement of useful arts was left to the meaner sort of people who had weaker parts and less opportunities to do it, and were therefore branded with the disgraceful name of mechanics . I rank the cook and the farmer with the scholar and philosopher' (pp. 81-3). Sydenham had no sympathy with 'the madness of those men who raving upon remote philosophicall notions contemp the easier and plainer ways of doeing good to his neigbour' (p. 139). Sydenham's clinical methods were correspondingly unorthodox and experimental. By the traditional method of treating smallpox with a heating regime 'greater slaughters are committed and more havoc made of mankind every year than hath been made in any age by the sword of the fiercest and most bloody tyrant that the world ever produced; and which makes it more sad, this destruction lights not upon any so much as the youth' (pp. 120-1). (2,664 persons, Dr. Dewhurst glosses, died of smallpox in London in 1667-8, out of a total population of half a million-p.40). Sydenham recommended fresh air and exercise for most complaints. He told one