Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/841

 S Y B S Y D 805 SYBARIS, a city of Magna Graecia, on the Gulf of Tarentum, between the rivers Crathis (Crati) and Sybaris (Coscile), which now meet 3 miles from the sea, but anciently had independent mouths, was the oldest Greek colony in this region. It was an Achaean colony founded by Isus of Helice (720 B.C.), but had among- its settlers many Trcezenians, who were ultimately expelled. Placed in a very fertile, though now most unhealthy, region, and fol- lowing a liberal policy in the admission of citizens from all quarters, the city became great and opulent, with a vast subject territory and divers daughter colonies even on the Tyrrhenian Sea (Posidonia, Laus, Scidrus). For magnifi- cence and luxury the Sybarites were proverbial throughout Greece, and in the 6th century probably no Hellenic city could compare with its wealth and splendour. At length contests between the democrats and oligarchs, in which many of the latter were expelled and took refuge at Crotona, led to a war with that city, and the Crotoniats with very inferior forces were completely victorious. They razed Sybaris to the ground and turned the waters of Crathis to flow over its ruins (510 B.C.). Explorations undertaken by the Italian Government in 1879 have failed to lead to a precise knowledge of the site. See Academy, vol. xvil p. 73 (24th January 1880) ; Lenormant, La Grande-Grece (1881), i. 325 sq. ; and THURII. SYCAMORE. See FIG, vol. ix. p. 154, and MAPLE, vol. xv. p. 524. SYDENHAM, a suburb of London, in the county of Kent, is finely situated chiefly on elevated ground about 7 miles south of Charing Cross, London. There is rail- way communication by the London, Brighton, and South Coast, the Mid Kent branch of the South-Eastern, and the London, Chatham, and Dover lines. Formerly Sydenham was a small hamlot of Lewisham, which rose into favour from its sylvan beauty, its pleasant situation, and its medicinal waters. These springs were discovered in 1640 on Sydenham common. The quality of the water re- sembled that of Epsom, and was regarded as efficacious in scorbutic and paralytic affections. After the construc- tion of a railway the suburb grew into high repute as a residence, especially for the wealthier commercial and pro- fessional classes. The construction of the Crystal Palace (see LONDON, vol. xiv. p. 836) in 1854 greatly aided the prosperity of Sydenham, although the building is not within its boundaries. There is a public lecture hall and literary institute at Sydenham Hill, and a school of art, science, and literature in connexion with the Crystal Palace. The charitable institutions include a home and infirmary for sick children and the South London dispen- sary for women. The population of the township (area, 1623 acres) was 19,065 in 1871, and 26,076 in 1881. SYDENHAM, THOMAS (1624-1689), "the English Hippocrates," was born at Winford Eagle in Dorset in 1624, where his father was a gentleman of property and good pedigree. At the age of eighteen he was entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford ; after two years his college studies appear to have been interrupted, and he served for a time as an officer in the army of the Parliament. He completed his Oxford course in 1648, graduating as bachelor of medi- cine, and about the same time he was elected a fellow of All Souls College. It was not until nearly thirty years later (1676) that he graduated as M.D., not at Oxford, but at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where his eldest son was then an undergraduate. His interest in medicine seems to have been aroused at an early age. Nothing is known of Sydenham's life between 1648 and 1663; but it is probable that he spent part of the time at Oxford. It is said also (on the authority of one Desault, in a work published at Bordeaux in 1733) that he studied at Mont- pellier, although it is not so stated by himself in his dedicatory letter to Dr Mapletoft, among the other auto- biographical facts there given. In 1663 he passed the examinations of the College of Physicians for their licence to practise in Westminster and 6 miles round ; but it is probable that he had been settled in London for some time before that. This minimum qualification to practise was the single bond between Sydenham and the College of Physicians throughout the whole of his career. He seems to have been distrusted by the heads of the faculty because he was an innovator and something of a plain- dealer. In his letter to Mapletoft he refers to a class of detractors "qui vitio statim vertunt si quis novi aliquid, ab illis non prius dictum vel etiam inauditum, in medium proferat"; and in a letter to Robert Boyle, written the year before his death (and the only authentic specimen of his English composition that remains), he says, " I have the happiness of curing my patients, at least of having it said concerning me that few miscarry under me ; but [I] cannot brag of my correspondency with some other of my faculty. . . . Though yet, in taking fire at my attempts to reduce practice to a greater easiness, plainness, and in the meantime letting the mountebank at Charing Cross pass unrailed at, they contradict themselves, and would make the world believe I may prove more considerable than they would have me." Sydenham attracted to him in warm friendship some of the most discriminating men of his time, such as John Locke and Robert Boyle. Hi.s first book, Methodus Curandi Febres, was published in 1 666 ; a second edition, with an additional chapter on the plague, in 1668; and a third edition, much enlarged and bearing the better-known title of Observationes Medicae, in 1676. His next publication was in 1680 in the form of two Epistolx Responsori&, the one, "On Epidemics," addressed to Brady, regius professor of physic at Cambridge, and the other, " On the Lues Venerea," to Paman, public orator at Cambridge and Gresham professor in London. In 1682 he issued another Dissertatio Epistolaris, on the treatment of confluent smallpox and on hysteria, addressed to Dr Cole of Worcester. The Tractatus de Podagra et Hydrope came out in 1683, and the Schedula Monitoria de Novx Febris Ingressu in 1686. His last completed work, Pro- cessus Integri, is an outline sketch of pathology and prac- tice ; twenty copies of it were printed in 1692, and, being a compendium, it has been more often republished both at home and abroad than any other of his writings separately. A fragment on pulmonary consumption was found among his papers. His collected writings occupy about 600 pages 8vo in the original Latin. Hardly anything is known of Sydenham's personal history in London. He died in an acute paroxysm of gout in December 1689. He was buried in the church of St James's, Piccadilly, where a mural slab was put up by the College of Physicians in 1810. Although Sydenham was a highly successful practitioner and saw more than one new edition of his various tractates called for, besides foreign reprints, in his lifetime, his fame as the father of English medicine, or the English Hippocrates, was decidedly posthumous. For a long time he was held in vague esteem for the success of his cooling (or rather expectant) treatment of smallpox, for his laudanum (the first form of a tincture of opium), and for his advocacy of the use of Peruvian bark in quartan agues. There were, however, those among his contemporaries who understood something of Sydenham's importance in larger matters than details of treatment and pharmacy, chief among them being the talented Morton. But the attitude of the academical medicine of the day is doubtless shown forth in Lister's use of the term "sectaries " for Sydenham and his admirers, at a time (1694) when the leader had been dead five years. If there were any doubt that the opposition to him was quite other than political, it would be set at rest by the testimony of Dr Andrew Brown, 1 who went from Scotland to inquire into Sydenham's practice, and has incidentally revealed 1 See Dr John Brown's Hone Subsecivw, art. "Dr Andrew Brown aud Sydenham."