Thomas Sydenham

• Thomas Sydenham


  English Hippocrates, improving understanding of disease during the Renaissance
• Many ideas from the Middle Ages were still being followed, especially those of the ancient doctors Hippocrates and Galen
• Thomas Sydenham


  • Felt he was just using good Hippocratic ideas of observation and diagnosis, but was quietly changing the way illness was diagnosed and how cures were attempted
• Thomas Sydenham's lifespan


  1624-1689
• Thomas Sydenham


  Known as the English Hippocrates, partly because of the methods he used
• The English Civil War in 1642 cut Sydenham's studies short, but this may have been helpful as it meant he began his studies and gained familiarity with the basics, then was more free to go out and seek his own ideas
• Thomas Sydenham's beliefs


  • Each disease was different and needed to be individually identified, each disease also required a different cure, believed in observation and diagnosis like Hippocrates, letting nature take its course with illness rather than trying to cure everything at random, encouraged taking the pulse as a method of diagnosis
• Thomas Sydenham published his findings in "Observationes Medicae"


  1676
• Sydenham discovered Sydenham's cholera and showed the difference between scarlet fever and measles
• Sydenham was a Christian but did not believe that God caused disease, only that God gave people the ability to recognize and fight it
• Sydenham's view of diseases


  Compared diseases to plants and animals, not quite the same as identifying germs as a cause of disease but along the right lines
• Sydenham took advantage of new ingredients being discovered all over the world, believing that the environment would contain not only the disease but also the cure, as part of God's plan
• Sydenham's work can be seen as part of the early Enlightenment, with the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge being set up in 1660 to support the development of new scientific ideas
• Sydenham questioned the idea that God caused disease


  He also questioned many of the old traditional ideas
• Sydenham used the observation and diagnosis that Hippocrates had been talking about since ancient Greek times


  So his work had both progress and change, but also elements of continuity
• Ordinary people and many doctors still believed superstitious and ancient ideas about medicine and disease, and theories like miasma were still thought to cause illness, meaning many treatments remained ineffective
• Thomas Sydenham's work


  Represents both change and progress, as well as continuity with Hippocratic ideas