SYDENHAX, THOMAS, a great English physician, was born of good parentage, in 1624, at Winford Eagle, Dorsetshire, and was educated at Magdalen hall, Oxford. According to the well-known French surgeon, Desault, he afterward studied at Mont pellier. He graduated at Oxford as bachelor in medicine in 1648. Through the interest of a near relative, he obtained a fellowship of All Souls college, and there con tinued to prosecute his medical studies. He left the university without taking a doctor's degree, which, indeed, he did not obtain till some time afterward at Cambridge. He settled as a practitioner at Westminster, and practiced so successfully that, when only 36 years of age, he already enjoyed the reputation of being one of the first physicians of the period. In his later years he was much. afflicted by gout, which at length carried him off on Dec. 29, 1689. He was buried in St. James's church. Sydenham was not profoundly accomplished as a man of science; even in his own age, deficient as it was in the advanced development to which the researches on which medicine is based ;lave now attained, he was inferior to several of his contemporaries; but in sagacity of observation and accuracy of diagnosis, he was unsurpassed. His skill and his phil
osophic cast of mind secured him the admiration and friendship of Locke; and his con tributions to the literature of his profession received the praise of Haller and Boer haave. His writings haVe been often republished both in England and on the continent, the edition entitled Opera Medial, which appeared at Geneva in 1716, being the best. Fevers were the department of medicine on which he first bestowed his attention; and before he had been many years in practice, he published, in 1666, his celebrated treatise entitled Curandi Febres Propriis Observationibus Superstrueta. This was after ward reprinted in 1675, with the observations accumulated in the interval. His treat ment of the then destructive malady of small-pox was especially felicitous, substituting, as he did, for the stimulating regimen in vogue, the antiphlogistic method of cool air and salines. The most scholarly translation of his works into English is that of Dr. R. G. Latham, published in the Sydenham society's series, to which he gives its name.