Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/439

 quarrel with the college. Fordyce took an important part in the compilation of the new 'Pharmacopeia Londinensis,' which was issued in 1788. In 1793 he assisted in forming a Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge, to the 'Transactions' of which he also contributed.

Fordyce was not at first successful in practice, owing, it is said, partly to disregard of appearances in manner and dress; but in later life he was fully occupied till his health began to give way. His habits had always been such as to try his constitution; and in early life, it is said, he often reconciled the claims of pleasure and business by lecturing for three hours in the morning without having gone to bed the night before. He had conceived the idea that man ought to eat only once in the day, and consequently took no meal but a dinner, though this, if anecdotes are trustworthy,was a very liberal one (, Coll. of Phys. 1878, ii. 375). He died of disorders connected with gout on 25 May 1802, at his house in Essex Street, Strand. He was the father of two sons, who died young, and two daughters, who survived him. His portrait, by T. Phillips, is preserved at St. Thomas's Hospital, and was engraved by S. Phillips in 1796.

Fordyce was a man of much intellectual force and of great attainments in medicine. His friend Dr. Wells, no mean judge, thought him more generally skilled in the medical sciences than any other person of his time. He was also a good chemist and mineralogist. One of his chemical papers in the 'Philosophical Transactions' (No. 7 in list below) is important as confirming by an indirect method the views of Priestley and Lavoisier in opposition to the doctrine of Phlogiston. His medical lectures, judging from the manuscript notes, seem to have been lucidly arranged and remarkable for rather elaborate logical analysis. They are said by Dr. Wells to have been composed and delivered entirely without notes, and with a slow, hesitating manner. The 'Elements of Physic' was the text-book for these lectures; but it is on the 'Treatise on Digestion' and the 'Dissertations on Fever' that Fordyce's reputation rests. The former, which was first delivered as the Gulstonian lecture before the College of Physicians, is a work of great ability and conceived in a scientific spirit. Rejecting all purely mechanical and chemical theories, he treats digestion as a physiological process. A similar reaction against the scholastic medical systems of the last century is shown in the 'Dissertations on Fever,' in which the leading principle is that 'observation of the disease is entirely to be adhered to, without any reasoning why or how anything in it takes place.' Fordyce's observations on the temperature of the human body were numerous and historically important. He devised experiments, the results of which were communicated to the Royal Society by Sir C. Blagden, which showed that the body preserves a constant temperature even in heated rooms. He wrote: In 'Philosophical Transactions:' (1) 'Of the Light produced by Inflammation,' vol. lxvi.; (2) 'Examination of Ores in Museum of Dr. W. Hunter,' vol. lxix.; (3) 'New Method of Assaying Copper Ores;' (4) 'On Loss of Weight in Bodies on being Melted or Heated,' vol. lxxv.; (5) 'Account of an Experiment on Heat,' vol. lxxvii.; (6) 'The Croonian Lecture on Muscular Motion;' (7) 'On the Cause of the Additional Weight which Bodies acquire on being Calcined,' vol. lxlxii.; (8) 'Account of a New Pendulum, being the Bakerian Lecture,' vol. Ixxxiv. In 'Transactions' of a society above mentioned: (1) 'Observations on the Small-pox and Causes of Fever;' (2) 'An Attempt to Improve the Evidence of Medicine;' (3) 'Some Observations upon the Composition of Medicines.'
 * 1) 'Elements of Agriculture and Vegetation,' Edinburgh, 1765, 8vo; 2nd edition, London; 3rd edition, ib., 1779 (lectures given to a class of gentlemen interested in agriculture).
 * 2) ' Elements of the Practice of Physic,' 2 vols., London; 2nd edition, 1768-70; 6th edition, ib., 1791.
 * 3) 'Treatise on the Digestion of Food,' London, 1791; 2nd edition, 1791.
 * 4) 'Dissertation on Simple Fever,' London, 1794; 2nd edition, ib., 1800; 'Second Dissertation on Tertian Intermittent Fever,' ib., 1795; 'Third Dissertation on Continued Fever,' 2 pts., 1798-9; 'Fourth Dissertation,' ib., 1802; 'Fifth Dissertation ' (edited after the author's death by Dr. Wells), ib., 1803.
 * 5) 'Syllabus of Lectures on Chemistry,' 12mo, s. d. The first four were translated into German.

 FORDYCE, JAMES, D.D. (1720–1796), presbyterian divine and poet, third son of George Fordyce of Broadford, merchant and provost of Aberdeen (who had twenty children), was born at Aberdeen in the last quarter of 1720. [q. v.] was his elder brother, [q. v.] and Sir [q. v.] were his younger brothers;, M.D. [q. v.], was his nephew. From the Aberdeen High School Fordyce proceeded to Marischal