Sydenham's Observationes Medicae

Thomas Sydenham's first book on fevers put its method in its title: Methodus curandi febres, propriis observationibus superstructa, a way of curing fevers built on his own observations. It came out in 1666. Ten years later he reissued it, much enlarged, as Observationes medicae circa morborum acutorum historiam et curationem, observations on the history and cure of acute diseases, printed in London by G. Kettilby.

Sydenham was born at Winford Eagle in Dorset in 1624 and entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1642. During the Civil War he is generally thought to have served on the side of Parliament, a cause his whole family supported. He became a bachelor of medicine in 1648 and a licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1663, and he took his MD at Cambridge only in May 1676.

The Royal College of Physicians' biography describes a man absorbed in watching disease who set little store by academic honors, and it calls him the British Hippocrates. His later writings kept to the same pattern: letters on the epidemic diseases of 1675 to 1680, a treatise on confluent smallpox and hysteria in 1682, and practical advice on fevers in 1686. He could also change his mind. In 1666 he was lukewarm about Peruvian bark for fevers, and ten years later, the James Lind Library notes, he called it the only specific.

For much of his life Sydenham suffered from gout and from stones in the kidney. He died at his house in Pall Mall on 29 December 1689, aged 65. A last work setting out his methods of treatment was published in 1693.