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The Creation of the English Hippocrates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Peter Anstey
Peter Anstey
Affiliation:
*Professor Peter Anstey, Department of Philosophy, University of Otago, PO Box 56 Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand. Email: peter.anstey@otago.ac.nz
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Abstract

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This article examines the process by which the London physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) rose to fame as the English Hippocrates in the late seventeenth century. It provides a survey of the evidence for the establishment of Sydenham’s reputation from his own writings, his professional relations, and the writings of his supporters and detractors. These sources reveal that in the first decades of his career Sydenham had few supporters and faced much opposition. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, Sydenham was the object of extraordinary outbursts of adulation and had become renowned for his decrying of hypotheses and speculative theory, his promotion of natural histories of disease, and the purported similarities between his medical method and that of Hippocrates. It is argued that Sydenham’s positive reputation owed little to his achievements in medicine: it was almost entirely the result of his promotion by the philosopher John Locke and a small group of sympathetic physicians. It was they who created the English Hippocrates.

Keywords

Giorgio BagliviHerman BoerhaaveAndrew BrownCollege of PhysiciansCharles GoodallJohn LockeThomas Sydenham
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 457 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 See Malcolm Baker, ‘The Portrait Sculpture’, in David McKitterick (ed.), The Making of the Wren Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110–37: 116.

2 See G.G. Meynell, The Two Sydenham Societies: A History and Bibliography of the Medical Classics Published by the Sydenham Society and the New Sydenham Society (1844–1911), (Acrise: Winterdown Books, 1985).

3 See, for example, Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20074), 80–1.

4 George Newman, Thomas Sydenham: Reformer of English Medicine (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1924), 32.

5 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longman, 1957), 91. Cranston goes on to make the extraordinary claim that Sydenham ‘was as distinguished in the fields of medical research and therapy as was Robert Boyle in the fields of chemistry and general science’, ibid. See also Joseph M. Levine, Dr Woodward’s Shield (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 10.

6 Kenneth Dewhurst (ed.), Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689): His life and Original Writings (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966), vii.

7 James L. Axtell (ed.), The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 70.

8 G.A.J. Rogers, ‘The Intellectual Setting and Aims of the Essay’, in Lex Newman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–32: 9.

9 Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis (1621–1675) (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968); and L.J. Rather, ‘Pathology at Mid-Century: A Reassessment of Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham’, in Allen Debus (ed.), Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 71–112.

10 See G.G. Meynell, Materials for a Biography of Dr Thomas Sydenham (Folkestone: Winterdown Books, 1988), 17.

11 The evidence is assessed in John Burrows and Peter Anstey, ‘John Locke, Thomas Sydenham and the “Smallpox Manuscripts”’, English Manuscript Studies, forthcoming. The first explicit mention of Sydenham in Boyle’s correspondence is in a letter from Hooke to Boyle of 5 June 1663, in Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe (eds), Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), Vol. 2, 84. However, it is almost certain that Boyle had Richard Lower investigate the Oxford University registers of degrees to substantiate Sydenham’s claim to an MA. This occurred before he received his licence to practise. No evidence of the degree has ever been found in the University records. See Lower to Boyle, 27 April 1663, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), idem, Vol. 2, 76, and Meynell, op. cit. (note 10), 18.

12 Boyle does allude to Sydenham as ‘the person you mention’ in a letter to Henry Oldenburg of 29 December 1667, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), ibid., Vol. 3, 388. For the context of this comment, see the letter referred to in note 18 below.

13 Thomas Sydenham, Methodus curandi febres (London, 1666), repr. G.G. Meynell (ed.), (Folkestone: Winterdown Books, 1987).

14 See, for example, Jonathan Walmsley, ‘Sydenham and the Development of Locke’s Natural Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16 (2008), 65–83: 67–8.

15 See Rather, op. cit. (note 9), 83–4 and Isler, op. cit. (note 9), 84–5.

16 Sydenham to Boyle, 2 April 1668, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 4, 56.

17 ‘Sydenham and some others in London say of Dr. Willis that hee is an ingenious man but not a good physitian, and that hee does not understand the way of practice’, quoted from Meynell, op. cit. (note 10), 68.

18 Henry Oldenburg to Boyle, 24 December 1667, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 3, 386.

19 Andrew Brown, A Vindicatory Schedule Concerning the Cure of Fevers (Edinburgh, 1691), 83. Locke owned a copy that is listed in John Harrison and Peter Laslett (eds), The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), No. 496.

20 Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 170. Sydenham was probably working amongst the poor in the late 1660s. See G.G. Meynell (ed.), Thomas Sydenham’s ‘Observationes medicae’ and his ‘Medical Observations’ (Folkestone: Winterdown Books, 1991), 26–7.

21 Dewhurst, ibid., 101 (corrected).

22 Henry Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation of the Sweating-Sickness (London, 1671), 175–7; see also Tobias Whitaker, An Elenchus of Opinions Concerning the Cure of the Small Pox (London, 1661).

23 See Donald G. Bates, ‘Thomas Sydenham: The Development of his Thought, 1666–1676’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Johns Hopkins University, 1975), 355. See also Woolhouse, op. cit. (note 3), 80. It should be pointed out that Ashley is nowhere explicitly named as the dedicatee in the Dedicatory Epistle, but that the weight of internal and external evidence renders it virtually certain that the work was composed for Ashley. See Burrows and Anstey, op. cit. (note 11).

24 Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 102 (corrected).

25 Sydenham was paid one pound one shilling for attending to a Mrs Jane. See National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), PRO 30/24/40/44, fol. 2v.

26 Bills for medicines ‘by Dr Sidnham’s order’ are at NA PRO 30/24/4/216/33, fols 337–40 (August–October 1673; paid 6 June 1674) and a receipt for £10 for visiting Sir William Hanham, dated 4 August 1673 is at NA PRO 30/24/4/216/28, fols 327–8.

27 Mapletoft writes ‘I thought it not best to mention these our Friend’s directions for reasons you may know, yet I beleivd you would not be displeased to have his opinion too in a case of this difficulty and concernment, which you may make use of as you find cause’, E.S. de Beer (ed.), Correspondence of John Locke (Corr.), 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89), Vol. 1, 537.

28 Sydenham to Boyle, 2 April 1668, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 4, 56.

29 ‘Preface’, in Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 103, 104.

30 Sydenham, cited in Meynell (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), 11 and 97–8. See also Sydenham, op. cit. (note 13), 53. Indeed, Sydenham’s concern with his reputation, often his posthumous reputation, is a hallmark of most of his writings. For a sampling of references to his posthumous reputation and legacy see: Sydenham to Dr William Gould, 10 December 1687 in Dewhurst, ibid., 174; Epistle to Dr Brady, in Robert Gordon Latham (ed.), The Works of Thomas Sydenham, 2 vols (London, The Sydenham Society, 1848), Vol. 2, 6; Treatise on gout and dropsy, ibid., 122; Schedula monitoria, ibid., 189.

31 Locke to John Mapletoft, 14 February 1673, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 1, 378.

32 G.G. Meynell, ‘Sydenham, Locke and Sydenham’s De peste sive febre pestilentiali’, Medical History, 36 (1993), 330–2.

33 Sydenham to Boyle, 2 April 1668, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 4, 55.

34 Sydenham’s advice is transcribed in Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 164–6.

35 Transcribed in Sir William Osler, ‘John Locke as a Physician’, Lancet, 156 (20 October 1900), 1119–20.

36 See Burrows and Anstey, op. cit. (note 11).

37 See John Read to Locke, April 1666, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 3, 11–14. For a full discussion of Locke’s chymistry and his connections with the chymical physicians, see Peter Anstey, ‘John Locke and Helmontian Medicine’, in Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal (eds), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 93–117.

38 See Robert G. Frank Jr, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).

39 See, for example, David E. Wolfe, ‘Sydenham and Locke on the Limits of Anatomy’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 35 (1961), 193–220, and François Duchesneau, L’empirism de Locke (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973).

40 For the attack on anatomy in English medicine, see Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 442–8. For Boyle on medical method, see Michael Hunter, ‘Boyle Versus the Galenists: A Suppressed Critique of Seventeenth-Century Medical Practice and its Significance’, in Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle 1627–1691: Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 157–201.

41 Locke claims ‘All that anatomie can doe is only to shew us the grosse & sensible parts of the body, or the vapid & dead juices’ (Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 85), while Boyle says ‘For all anatomy can do, is to manifest or display the structure of the consistent parts, such as the bones, cartilages, nerves, arteries, veins etc. and expose to our senses the visible liquors of the body, such as blood, gall, the concreted juices, urine, etc’. Unhappily, the Boylean fragment only survives as a paragraph in the posthumous Christian Virtuoso, II, in Michael Hunter and E.B. Davis (eds), Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), Vol. 12, 473, and we know nothing of its date of composition.

42 Pace Jonathan Walmsley, ‘John Locke on Respiration’, Medical History, 51 (2007), 453–76: 474.

43 See Daniel Coxe to Boyle, 14 October 1666, in Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), op. cit. (note 11), Vol. 3, 249. For Sydenham’s later view of chymistry, see Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30), Vol. 2, 172.

44 The evidence for Sydenham’s early views on anatomy rests on an interpolated comment preceding the opening of Locke’s Anatomia. See Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 6), 85. For Sydenham’s later view see ‘On Dropsy’, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30), Vol. 2, 171–2; originally published in De podagra et hydrope (London, 1683).

45 Sydenham, cited in Meynell (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), 74.

46 For further discussion see Peter Anstey and John Burrows, ‘John Locke, Thomas Sydenham, and the Authorship of Two Medical Essays’, Electronic British Library Journal, 3 (2009), 1–42: 19–22.

47 He arrived in France on 15 November 1675 and returned on 9 May 1679.

48 See Oldenburg to Newton, 15 May 1676, in H.W. Turnbull (ed.), Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume II, 1676–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 7. It is also likely that Oldenburg also sent a copy of Sydenham’s Observationes medicae to Marcello Malpighi in late 1676: Malpighi to Oldenburg, 5 January 1677, in Howard B. Adelmann (ed.), Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 5 vols, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), Vol. 2, 746.

49 Charles Goodall, The Colledge [sic] of Physicians Vindicated, and the True State of Physick in this Nation Faithfully Represented (London, 1676), 34, 175–7 and 185. For an analysis of this controversial work see Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 199–201.

50 One can almost hear Goodall addressing the Fellows of the College when he says, ‘in relation to Candidates, who took their degrees in foreign Universities, and are therefore obliged to incorporate in one of our own, before they be admitted into the Colledge; you may observe the Colledge, like trueborn English-men, so much concerning themselves for the welfare and honour of their own Countrey, and reputation of the two famous Universities of this Land; that their being foreigners by birth, or non-incorporating into one of our own Academies, (though degrees have been taken in others) is a sufficient bar to their being admitted as Candidates’, Goodall, ibid., 34–5.

51 See Harold J. Cook, ‘Goodall, Charles (c.1642–1712)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10949>, accessed 11 April 2011.

52 ‘[M]y friend Dr Charles Goodall, the mention of whose name reminds me of his candour, probity, friendship, and medical skill, to a patient…’, Epistles to Dr Brady and Dr Paman, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 2, 8.

53 Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), 190.

54 Epistolary Dissertation, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 2, 83.

55 Charles Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, Founded and Established by Law; as Appears by Letters Patents, Acts of Parliament, Adjudged Cases, &c. and An Historical Account of the College’s Proceedings against Empiricks and Unlicensed Practisers, 2 vols (London, 1684), Vol. 2, Sig. Xx1v.

56 Epistles to Dr Brady and Dr Paman, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 2, 4.

57 Schedula monitoria, ibid., 187.

58 For example, Jonathan Walmsley claims that ‘Sydenham’s Observationes medicae redefined medical practice’ and that it was ‘a hugely influential work which would eventually secure Sydenham’s reputation and become a landmark in therapeutics’ (‘Sydenham’, op. cit. (note 14) 80 and 72) and Gianna Pomata claims that Sydenham’s Observationes medicae ‘marked a decisive transformation of the genre [of Observationes]’, Gianna Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine’, Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010), 193–236: 226. Neither author provides any evidence to support their claims.

59 Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 2, 188.

60 Brown, op. cit. (note 19), Sig. ??2.3.

61 Surprisingly, this poem is omitted from Latham’s edition of The Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) and is neither mentioned in J.F. Payne’s Thomas Sydenham (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900) nor Kenneth Dewhurst’s Dr Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 6), nor G.G. Meynell’s Materials for a Biography of Dr Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 10). The poem was reprinted in Anon., Musarum anglicanarum analecta, sive Poemata quaedam melioris notae (Oxford, 1692), 90–3.

62 Brown, op. cit. (note 19), 1. For the context and an analysis of Brown’s book, see Andrew Cunningham, ‘Sydenham Versus Newton: The Edinburgh Fever Dispute of the 1690s between Andrew Brown and Archibald Pitcairne’, Medical History Supplement, 1 (1981), 71–98. An anonymous referee for this article alerted me to this reference.

63 Brown, ibid., preface and 30, 80, 84, 92.

64 In fact, Cole had mentioned Sydenham in passing in his A Physico–Medical Essay Concerning the Late Frequency of Apoplexies (Oxford, 1689), 113.

65 See Richard Morton, Phthisiologia seu exercitationes de phthisi (London, 1689), Sig a1v–a2r and Walter Harris, De morbis acutis infantum (London, 1689), 45–51.

66 Jacob Spon, Observations on Fevers and Febrifuges (London, 1682), 7–8. Brown also mentions Michael Ettmüler of Leipzig and Johann Dolaeus, physician to the Landgrave of Hesse, as giving favourable mentions of Sydenham; Brown, op. cit. (note 19), 86–7.

67 Goodall to Locke, 25 July 1687, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 3, 234; Harrison and Laslett (eds), op. cit. (note 19), No. 2751 and No. 2751a.

68 James Forrest, A Brief Defence, of the Old and Succesful Method of Curing Continual Fevers in Opposition to Doctor Brown and his Vindicatory Schedule (Edinburgh, 1694), 152.

69 Bodleian Library MS Locke f. 21, 17. See Sydenham, cited in Meynell (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), 98.

70 See Thomas Sydenham, Observationes medicae (London, 1676), Sig. A6r = in Latham, op. cit. (note 61), Vol. 1, 6. For the text of the preface see G.G. Meynell, ‘John Locke and the Preface to Thomas Sydenham’s Observationes medicae’, Medical History, 50 (2006), 93–110: 101–10.

71 Meynell, ibid.

72 Locke asked Thomas Stringer to send him three copies of Sydenham’s Observationes medicae (1676) while he was in Montpellier, two of which he gave to Dr Brouchier and Barbeyrac. See Thomas Stringer to Locke, 5 June 1676, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 1, 446–7.

73 Locke to Mapletoft, 12/22 June 1677, in ibid., Vol. 1, 492.

74 Locke to Mapletoft, 30 July/9 August 1677, ibid., Vol. 1, 504. See also Mapletoft to Locke, 28 June 1676, idem, Vol. 1, 450; Sydenham to Locke, 4 June 1677, idem, Vol. 1, 488–9; William Charleton to Locke, 22 January 1678, idem, Vol. 1, 546; Sydenham to Locke, 30 August 1679, idem, Vol. 2, 80; and 6 September 1679, idem, Vol. 2, 94.

75 Locke to Mary Clarke, 28 February/9 March 1688, ibid., Vol. 3, 386. Dewhurst was right to claim that ‘[i]t was mainly through Locke’s constant advocacy that Sydenham’s works came to be more highly regarded in Holland than in England’, Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 53), 282.

76 See de Beer’s note to Dr Mattheus Sladus to J.G. Graevius, 22 November/2 December 1684, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 2, 655.

77 Peter Anstey, ‘Experimental Versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’, in Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (eds), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 215–42.

78 John Dunton, The Young-Students-Library (London, 1692), vi–vii.

79 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, P.H. Nidditch (ed.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 9–10.

80 Ibid., 10. See Chapter 1 of Peter R. Anstey, John Locke and Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

81 This is Guenellon’s expression. See Guenellon to Locke, 11/21 March 1690, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 4, 26.

82 Goodall to Locke, 21 May 1690, ibid., Vol. 4, 83. Locke had a copy of Phthisiologia, see Harrison and Laslett (eds), op. cit. (note 19), No. 2056.

83 Cole to Locke, 30 April 1690, in de Beer (ed.), ibid., Vol. 4, 65.

84 Cole to Locke, 11 June 1690, ibid., Vol. 4, 92

85 Ibid., 91.

86 Dewhurst, op. cit. (note 53), 301.

87 Dr Pieter Guenellon to Locke, 3/13 August 1692, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 4, 492–3. See also Pieter Guenellon to Locke 13/23 February 1693, idem, Vol. 4, 643 and 30 October/10 November 1702, idem, Vol. 7, 699; Dr Egbertus Veen to Locke, 1 February 1692, idem, Vol. 4, 372. For Dr Charles Willoughby’s reply to the questionnaire from Ireland see ‘On a MS of Dr Willoughby’s, Written in 1690, “On the Climate and Diseases of Ireland”’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 6 (1857), 399–415; reprinted in Kenneth Dewhurst, ‘The Genesis of State Medicine in Ireland’, Irish Journal of Medical Sciences, 363 (1956), 365–84: 370–81.

88 Locke to Thomas Molyneux, 1 November 1692, de Beer (ed.), ibid., Vol. 4, 563, underlining added.

89 For the Baconian method of natural history see Peter Anstey, ‘Locke, Bacon and Natural History’, Early Science and Medicine, 7 (2002), 65–92; and Peter Anstey and Michael Hunter, ‘Robert Boyle’s “Designe about Natural History”’, Early Science and Medicine, 13 (2008), 83–126.

90 Locke to Thomas Molyneux, 20 January 1693, in de Beer (ed.), op. cit. (note 27), Vol. 4, 628–9, underlining added.

91 Ibid., 630.

92 Dr John Hutton to Locke, 27 April 1695, ibid., Vol. 5, 354, 355.

93 The letter and report are transcribed in ibid., Vol 5, 382–3.

94 Quoting the English translation of Giorgio Baglivi, De praxi medica (Rome, 1696), The Practice of Physick, Reduc’d to the Ancient Way of Observations (London, 1704), 143. See also Conrad Sprengell’s, Natura morborum medicatrix (London, 1705), 317 for an implicit aligning of Hippocrates with both Sydenham and Baglivi. Sprengell’s work was printed with Matthias Purmann’s Chirurgia curiosa (London, 1706).

95 Baglivi, ibid., 318.

96 Quoting Richard Waller’s translation, Essayes of Natural Experiments Made in the Academie del Cimento (London, 1684), Sig. b2v–b3r.

97 See Howard B. Adelmann (ed.), Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, 5 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), Vol. 1, 558–87.

98 Baglivi to Manget, 1 August 1693, in Dorothy M. Schullian (ed.), The Baglivi Correspondence from the Library of Sir William Osler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 112 and note 26 on 114, for further references to Sydenham in Baglivi’s Opera omnia (Lugduni, 1704).

99 Manget to Baglivi, 17/27 September 1693, in Schullian, ibid., 117–18.

100 See, for example, Sydenham’s claim that he does ‘not venture to speculate beyond what I am taught by the facts themselves’ immediately after his reflections on the miasmic origin of smallpox, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 1, 220.

101 Jean Le Clerc, The Life and Character of Mr John Locke (London, 1706), 3–4.

102 John Locke, Some Familiar Letters between Mr Locke and Several of his Friends (London, 1708), 283–6.

103 E. Kegel-Brinkgreve and A.M. Luyendijk-Elshout (eds), Boerhaave’s Orations (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 78. See also Boerhaave’s A Method of Studying Physick (London, 1719), 316: ‘Sydenham, whom no one ought to mention but with Honour. This Author laying aside all Pomp of Learning and Systems, did nothing else but observe by the Clinica Methodus of the Ancients what happen’d in Distempers’. Andrew Cunningham claims that it was Boerhaave ‘who made Sydenham into one of the great masters of the history of medicine’, in Andrew Cunningham, ‘Thomas Sydenham: Epidemics, Experiment and the “Good Old Cause”’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 164–90: 189, but he entirely ignores the roles of Locke and Baglivi.

104 Perrott Williams to James Jurin, 11 January 1724, Andrea Rusnock (ed.), The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 222, underlining added.

105 Edward Bayly to James Jurin, 29 February 1724, ibid., 234, underlining added.

106 P[eter] P[axton], The Grounds of Physick Examined (London, 1703), 49–50, underlining added.

107 James Keill, An Account of Animal Secretion, the Quantity of Blood in the Humane Body, and Muscular Motion (London, 1708), xxiii–xxiv.

108 Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of Consumptions and Other Distempers Belonging to the Breast and Lungs, 2nd edn (London, 1725), Sig. b1–2.

109 See Rather, op. cit. (note 9), 7–8.

110 For Sydenham’s claim that ‘nature’ refers to ‘the whole complex of natural causes’ as regulated by God see Methodus, op. cit. (note 13), 215; Observationes medicae, II. ii. 48, Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 1, 119–20. For further discussion see Rather, ibid., 88–94.

111 Sydenham, Methodus, op. cit. (note 13), 53.

112 Martin Lister, Octo exercitationes medicinales (London, 1697), 188.

113 See, for example, Gideon Harvey, A New Discourse of the Smallpox and Malignant Fevers (London, 1685), 194.

114 Sydenham in Meynell (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), 11. There has been a recurrent misunderstanding since Sydenham’s day that his natural histories are case histories. For a contemporary example see the ‘Sydenhamian’ histories of Richard Morton’s Phthisiologia, which Guenellon took to be following Sydenham’s method, see op. cit. (note 81). For a more recent example of this misunderstanding see James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (London: Macmillan, 1987), 1. G.G. Meynell has pointed out that Sydenham ‘never, except for smallpox and measles, provided a description of the course, day by day, of either an individual or an idealised case’, notes to op. cit. (note 20), 186. Case studies do appear in Sydenham’s writings but they are uncommon.

115 From the early 1660s, the history of diseases had formed part of the Baconian programme for natural history. Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, among others, openly called for such histories and a number of virtuoso-physicians, such as Timothy Clarke and Daniel Coxe, adopted the method of natural history. For Wren’s call for histories of diseases see Christopher Wren, Parentalia (London, 1750), 223. For Boyle, see his, ‘General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey [sic]’, Philosophical Transactions, 1 (1666), 186–9: 187 and especially his ‘Topics for the History of Diseases’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle’s ‘Heads’ and ‘Inquiries’, Robert Boyle Project Occasional Paper No. 1 (London: Robert Boyle Project, Birkbeck College, 2005) 33–4 (a copy of these heads is in Locke’s notebook, Bodleian Library MS Locke c. 42 (part 1), 98). For references to histories of disease in Boyle’s Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, II, i, (1663) see, for example, Hunter and Davis (eds), op. cit. (note 41), Vol. 3, 322, 534.

116 It is a moot point as to just what Locke himself would have thought of the epithet ‘the English Hippocrates’. Locke, as is well known, referred to his friend as Aesclepius, an allusion to the Greek god of medicine and healing. Sydenham himself was the first to draw a connection between his medical method and that of Hippocrates. There are four references to Hippocrates in the preface to his Observationes medicae (Works of Thomas Sydenham, op. cit. (note 30) Vol. 1, 11, 16, 18 and 24).