A model of
this sort arose in England in the middle of the seventeenth century,
Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), who took men back to Hippocrates, just as
Harvey had led them back to Galen. Sydenham broke with authority
and went to nature. It is extraordinary how he could have been so
emancipated from dogmas and theories of all sorts. He laid down the
fundamental proposition, and acted upon it, that "all disease could be
described as natural history." To do him justice we must remember,
as Dr. John Brown says, "in the midst of what a mass of errors and
prejudices, of theories actively mischievous, he was placed, at a time
when the mania of hypothesis was at its height, and when the practical
part of his art was overrun and stultified by vile and silly nostrums"
("Horae Subsecivae," Vol. I, 4th ed., Edinburgh, 1882, p. 40).
Listen to what he says upon the method of the study of medicine: "In
writing therefore, such a natural history of diseases, every merely
philosophical hypothesis should be set aside, and the manifest and
natural phenomena, however minute, should be noted with the utmost
exactness. The usefulness of this procedure cannot be easily overrated,
as compared with the subtle inquiries and trifling notions of modern
writers, for can there be a shorter, or indeed any other way of coming
at the morbific causes, or discovering the curative indications than by
a certain perception of the peculiar symptoms? By these steps and helps
it was that the father of physic, the great Hippocrates, came to excel,
his theory being no more than an exact description or view of nature.
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