Thomas Sydenham

3 Key excerpts on "Thomas Sydenham"

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  eBook - ePub

  A History of Medicine

  • Lois N. Magner, Oliver Kim, Oliver J Kim(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Thomas Sydenham was the epitome of the clinician, that is, a doctor who was devoted to carefully observing and caring for his patients, rather than debating medical theories or conducting anatomical research. He had little patience with physicians who behaved as if their theories and research were more significant than medicine practiced at the bedside of the patient. In an era when the most interesting medical research was carried out in the autopsy room, patients with long, lingering illnesses might well frustrate a physician-scientist who was overly devoted to research. Like Hippocrates, Sydenham believed that it was the task of the physician to assist the body’s natural healing processes while finding patterns in symptoms and searching for the cause of disease. Since clinical medicine was an art that demanded acute observation, experience, and balanced judgment, the true physician should dedicate himself to useful techniques, common sense, and the principles of Hippocrates.

  Politically, as well as professionally, Sydenham might be regarded as the antithesis of William Harvey. Sydenham and his brothers fought as soldiers in the Parliamentary Army; their mother was killed in a Royalist raid. Several close encounters with death during the war convinced Sydenham that a special providence had spared his life. After the Royalists were defeated, Sydenham resumed his studies at Oxford and received a bachelor’s degree in medicine. In 1655, Sydenham resigned his Oxford fellowship and established a private practice in a London neighborhood close to the malarial marshes that generated a steady supply of fever patients. He also attended the sick at various London hospitals.

  Puritan principles, especially the idea that increasing useful knowledge was a paramount religious duty, guided Sydenham’s approach to medicine. Medical education, according to Sydenham, could only take place at the bedside of the sick, not in the classroom, library, or anatomical theater. Close observation of the natural history of disease in a hospital for lower class patients was valuable training because physicians could discover which treatments were most effective before “risking the lives of people of quality.” Recommending moderation in all things, Sydenham prescribed appropriate diets, drugs, exercise, and opium, the drug God had created for the relief of pain.

  In 1665, after fleeing from the Great Plague of London, Sydenham completed his Medical Observations Concerning the History and Cure of Acute Diseases . As an admirer of the rapidly developing science of taxonomy, Sydenham studied the natural history of disease to discover and delineate individual species of disease. Collecting many examples of each species was unnecessary, he argued because attention to a small number of cases would produce information that applied to all similar cases. As Virgil said, “Ab uno disce omnes

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  History of Physiology

  Proceedings of the 28th International Congress of Physiological Sciences, Budapest, 1980

  • E. Schultheisz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  (If Harvey’s doctrine was, in effect, a challenge to Galenism, Harvey himself was not an explicit anti-Galenist.) In the second quarter of the seventeenth century the experimental philosophers came to have their own doctrine and practice, using the philosophy of Francis Bacon [ 1, 2 ]. In the middle years of the century physiology advanced rapidly, independently of clinical medicine, and relating these studies to medical practice came to be first clearly seen as a matter for discussion in the writings of one who made clinical medicine itself an example of experimental philosophy, namely Thomas Sydenham. Thomas Sydenham was born in 1624 into a family of some importance in their own neighbourhood, in the county of Dorset [ 10 ]. The Sydenhams fought for Parliament against the Royalists, and Thomas’s mother and elder brother were both killed during the fighting of 1644. In 1646, when the victory of Parliament was generally assured, Thomas Sydenham resigned his commission and resumed at Oxford the study of medicine, interrupted by his war service. He became a Fellow of All Soul’s College in 1648, and resigned his fellowship in 1655, when he married and began the practice of medicine in London. Sydenham’s writings indicate that, while he was in Oxford, he was in touch with the experimentalists whose club gathered there under Wilkins, Cromwell’s brother-in-law. Sydenham’s first printed work, the Methodus curandi febres, published in 1666, was dedicated to Robert Boyle. Thomas Sydenham’s writings show his intellectual ancestry. He quotes Francis Bacon favourably and has repeated praise for Hippocrates. On the other hand he mentions Galen only once. Sydenham does not mention the humanistic experimentalist Francis Glisson, whom he probably met in 1676 [ 11 ], the year of Sydenham’s first explicit generalised statement of his medical philosophy [ 12 ]. The iatro-chemical tradition he sets aside, although admitting some of its chemical remedies to be useful [ 13 ]

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  Reinventing Hippocrates

  • David Cantor(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ironically, although the ‘English Hippocrates’, as Sydenham came to be known in the eighteenth century, and the Oxford physiologists were contemporaries and Sydenham studied in Oxford when the latter were active young investigators, his attitude towards medical knowledge could not be more opposed to theirs. According to Sydenham, whose published works contained references only to Hippocrates and no other medical authorities, God had designed man so as to be capable of perceiving only the superficial aspects of reality, the ‘outer husk of things’. 28 The metaphor for true knowledge was not mathematics, as Galen, Willis and other rationalists imagined, but botany: ‘It is necessary that all diseases be reduced to definite and certain species and that, with the same care which we see exhibited by botanists in their phytologies.’ 29 Furthermore, Sydenham considered nature ‘an abyss of cause’. 30 For instance, anatomists were incapable of achieving an understanding of the brain because, although it displayed the ‘method of the Supreme Artificer in his wondrous and wise machinery’, the brain was ‘so coarse a substance (a mere pulp, and that not over-nicely wrought)’ that ‘no diligent contemplation of its structure will tell us how [it] should subserve so noble an end’. 31 Importantly, Sydenham thought that cause was not only unknowable by definition, but also that such knowledge was not useful in the practice of medicine. Two years after Willis’s Cerebri anatome (1664), Sydenham first published his Methodus (1666). In a passage from this edition that may have referred directly to Willis, then Oxford’s Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, Sydenham explicitly eschewed interest in medical philosophy or aetiology: For my own part, I am not ambitious of the name of a Philosopher, and those who think themselves so, may, perhaps consider me blamable on the score of my not having attempted to pierce into these mysteries

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