Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/123

 SYDENHAM. 105 that calamitous period, the plague also raged in many parts of England, and it chanced to be brought from another place to Dunster, where some of the soldiers dying suddenly with an erup- tion of spots, it seized many others. Among the troops was a surgeon, who had been a great traveller, but who was at that time serving as a common soldier, and who humbly entreated the governor of the castle to permit him to do all he could for the relief of his fellow- soldiers, afflicted with this dreadful disease ; leave being obtained, he took away a vast quantity of blood from every sick person, on the first attack of the disease, before there was any sign of swell- ing : he bled them till they were ready to drop down, for he bled them all standing and in the open air : nor had he any vessel in which to measure the blood : afterwards he ordered them to lie in their tents, and though he gave no medicine at all after the bleeding, yet, of the many whom he thus treated, not one died. On the propriety of copious and frequently repeated bleeding, Sydenham appeals to those physicians wlio conti- nued in town while the plague raged, and confi- dently asks if they had ever observed, when this practice had been employed before any tumour appeared, the death of any one patient to ensue. He, however, met with much obstruction in the employment of his method of cure, and says, with great simplicity, "I will give an instance of an injury I once did, but without guilt, not because I let blood, but because I was not allowed to take away as much as was necessary. Being sent for to a young man of a sanguine complexion, and