Sydenham, THOMAS, the 'sommo Ippocratista inglese' (supreme English Hippocratist), as Puccinotti styles him, was born in 1624 at Winford Eagle in Dorsetshire, and died in London, 29th December 1689. That he belonged to one of the county families; that at eighteen he was entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; that his studies were, after two years, interrupted by his having to serve as an officer in the parliamentarian army; that his Oxford curriculum ended in 1648 when he graduated M.B., and shortly after became a Fellow of All Souls—is the sum of our knowledge as to his youth and early manhood. For the next fifteen years we lose sight of him, though he probably spent some of them at Oxford, if not also at Montpellier. We find him in London in 1663 as a licentiate of the College of Physicians, publishing his Methodus Curandi Febres in 1666; and ten years thereafter taking his M.D. at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. With the College of Physicians, or even with Oxford, he seems to have had no subsequent connection; and all through his life he was not a persona grata with the faculty. The 'Iatro-physical' and 'Chemiatric' theories in fashion at the time he treated with scant consideration, and looked upon chemistry itself as a mere branch of the apothecary's business. But from his intimacy with John Locke and Robert Boyle we might infer his appreciation of the true philosopher and the true physicist, even if we did not know his profound mastery of the Hippocratic method and his perfect assimilation of the Hippocratic spirit. In 1668 he published a second edition of his book on fevers, adding to it a chapter on plague, with a fine poem in Latin elegiacs addressed to him by Locke. A third and enlarged edition, entitled Observationes Medice, appeared in 1676. In 1680 he published two Epistolæ Responsivæ, the one 'On Epidemics,' and the other on the 'Lues Venerea.' His Dissertatio Epistolaris on confluent smallpox and hysteria (1682) was followed next year by his yet more famous Tractatus de Podagra et Hydrope. In 1686 appeared his Schedula Monitoria de Novæ Febris Ingressu, and in 1692 his last work, Processus Integri, an outline of pathology and therapeutics. An acute attack of gout carried him off in his sixty-sixth year, and he was interred in St James's Church, Piccadilly, where in 1810 the College of Physicians erected a mural tablet to his memory.
Sydenham's place in the history of medicine has already been given. Seemingly behind his age in science, he was really ahead of it in practice. The new-born anatomy and physiology had with prema- ture confidence lent itself to theories, mathematical and chemical, which were utterly at variance with the phenomena of disease as noted at the bedside. He soon satisfied himself that it was hopeless to reconcile them, and that meanwhile, with practical English sense, it was his business to get his patients well. In acute disease he read the forth-putting of that activity by which nature sought to right herself—an activity to be watched and, when possible, to be assisted. Called in to a patient who had been deplorably reduced by lowering treatment, he reversed the practice and 'ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary.' Chronic diseases he also viewed with the eye of Hippocrates, as due to habits or errors for which we ourselves are mainly responsible, and these he met by appropriate changes in diet and mode of life. The Hippocratic 'natural history method' of looking at and treating ailments of all kinds it was his great merit to have intelligently revived. Among special contributions to nosology he may be said to have first diagnosed scarlatina and classified chorea, while Puccinotti claims for him the title of 'restorer of the curative treatment of smallpox.' Gout was another ailment on which he left a memorable mark. It was as a practitioner, however, that his powers worked most freely and most felicitously.
See Puccinotti's Storia della Medicina, vol. iii.; Häser's Geschichte der Medicin; Dr W. A. Greenhill's admirably edited Opera Omnia of Sydenham, with Dr R. G. Latham's English rendering of the same (both published by the Sydenham Society, which was founded in 1843); Dr John Brown's Locke and Sydenham; and Picard, Sydenham, sa Vie, ses Œuvres (Paris, 1889).