Thomas Sydenham: epidemics, experiment and the ‘Good Old Cause’

Abstract

QUESTIONS My central question here will be: why, with respect to medicine, did Thomas Sydenham see what he saw and do what he did? Answering this will of course entail answering the question what it was that Sydenham did with respect to medicine in the London of the three and a half decades 1656 to 1689. Thomas Sydenham has posthumously acquired one of the greatest of all names in the history of western medicine. He is celebrated amongst historians of medicine as the inaugurator or reviver of clinical or (to express it in English rather than Greek) bedside medicine – which we treat as a highly positive achievement – and has been awarded the title of the ‘English Hippocrates’. Such was his fame in early nineteenth-century Britain that two successive societies dedicated to the publishing of modern and ancient ‘classic texts’ in medicine were named after him. The works of Sydenham, in Latin and then in English, were amongst the earliest works issued, and I like to think they were planned to be the first. Naturally enough, therefore, Sydenham has attracted his share of medical historians to celebrate his work and achievement. I trust that nevertheless it does not appear too arrogant of me to claim that all this effort has not yet given us a satisfactory account of either the activity or the achievement of Thomas Sydenham. At all events, it is to this most fundamental of issues that I address myself here.

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